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Published: September 2nd 2007
Bokor Hill
View from the base.Started off today slightly weary, I'd booked a day trip to Bokor National Park and the taxi that came to pick me up didn't represent a taxi in the slightest. It was just some heap rammed full of shady looking Cambodian guys. I was given front seat thus had to devise a self defence choreography in my head for when they decided to stop off in the middle of nowhere and brutally savage me. As it turned out though I was just being to mistrusting and the self defence procedure didn't have to come into effect.
I was dropped off at the base of Bokor mountain and picked up by another heap which was to take me along a 30km potholed track for 2 hours to the summit some 1000m up.
(why is it whenever I go to blog something in Bangkok I'm sat next to some complete nut, today there's some drunk prossie sat next to me making really demonic exorcist styley noises, quite disturbing.)
Bokor National Park itself boasts some 350,000 acres of prime forest and it is believed that Tigers, Leopards, Pythons and Elephants roam here. Unfortunately I wasn't to see such sights on my
visit as apparently they stay well away from the touristy areas.
My main cause for being here however was to see the abandoned Bokor Hill Station at the top of the mountain. In the early half of the 20th Century the French built a giant casino/hotel here known as the Bokor Palace. Accompanying the palace were several other buildings among them a Catholic church.
It is said that those that lost big steaks would launch themselves off the cliff edge at the back of the Casino or alternatively hang themselves from nearby trees.
When the French lost occupation of Cambodia the whole place became abandoned and it was converted into the ghost town it is today. The last piece of action to have occurred here apart from a scene filmed in 2002 for a Matt Dillon directed film called City of Ghosts was in 1979 when the Khmer Rouge were holed up in the church fighting the Vietnamese who were based in the palace. The whole place is said to be haunted at night with the cries of the soldiers that lost their lives here.
The place was eerie enough during the day so I definitely
had no intentions of sticking around until nightfall....well actually I probably would have as it would have been quite cool but this wasn't part of the tour package. There is a near constant mist surrounding the town, it's like something you'd expect to see in the Silent Hill computer game series. The whole place is deadly silent until you walk to the cliff edge and you are struck by an orchestra of animal life bellowing out from the forests below. It's a very fierce looking drop one might add, so those that did choose to take the plunge would have definitely expired at the other end. It's an amazing view though, all across the national park and the Gulf of Thailand.
Wasn't quite given enough time to see the entire town but I had a good mooch around the casino and church. Quite surreal how the whole place is just totally abandoned, but it makes for an interesting days adventure. Only downfall being the 4 hour slog to and from the park.
My trip to Cambodia has been a very worthwhile one, nowhere near as edgy as I was led to believe. As in Thailand everyone is out
to scam you to bits but as long as you do your homework and barter with the locals you can usually come to a sensible agreement. And on that same note when you do feel as if you are getting ripped off it's usually not by a lot compared to western standards, especially when you consider that the average daily wage out here is about a quid a day.
The country has some amazing attractions and with tourism only taking effect in the past several years things could be set to change here. As long as the country cleans up its act a little and remains stable the future could be promising for Cambodia.
As for me my next stop will be Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
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