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Published: December 19th 2007
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From the top of Bokor Hill Station Upon arrival in Kampot it was patently obvious to Greg, Gem and myself that there wasn't a great deal to keep us occupied in the town, so we booked our tour up to the nearby Bokor Hill Station and made arrangements to head back to the coast at Kep the following day. As it turned out, we were glad that we went up to Bokor in the sense that there'd be no point going to Kampot otherwise. It was however a rather harrowing day which left us very sore.
Bokor Hill Station is a bizarre place. It's now a literal ghost town, remnants of a French colonial 'settlement' high on a mountain overlooking the coast. I use the inverted commas for 'settlement' cos all it really consisted of back in the day was a hotel/casino complex and a Catholic church. While the views from up there were spectacular, especially from the top of the hotel, it is difficult to describe in words just how absurd the location was.
From Kampot (the closest town), it took us over three hours to get there along the worst road in the world. Wikipedia describes it as "a broken road that is barely
Where is the craps table?
The gaming floor at the old casino passable under optimum conditions." It would have been uncomfortable enough if we were sitting in a padded car seat while we rode every pothole and boulder on the road. Going the whole way sitting in the tray of a ute as we did it on the other hand was a spine-melting experience. It was one of those trips that just seemed to go on and on and on and on... until the ute broke down when we were still forty minutes or so from the top. Well I would have called it a breakdown myself, even though our guide assured us that "it's not broken, it just doesn't work at the moment." After an hour or so of waiting, the ute started working again (I suppose that proved our guide's point) and we finally made it up to the top.
I would love to have seen the feasibility study and occupancy statistics for the hotel/casino. Perched high on a windswept hill, there was literally nothing around. Any guests at the hotel who didn't enjoy throwing a bit of money round on the casino tables would have had not a thing to do. I also can't imagine they would have
Target practice
The Vietnamese shot at the Khmer Rouge in the Catholic Church from here gotten much business from Kampot either, as the thought of driving home for over three hours on a terrible, unlit road through thick jungle after doing your nuts on the tables probably deterred most.
The settlement was abandoned around the time the French were hounded out of Indochina, although it played an interesting role in the Cambodian war with Vietnam in 1979. The Vietnamese had set up camp in the hotel, while the Khmer Rouge troops were holed up in the Catholic church (maybe five or six hundred metres away), and the two sides fired shots at each other over the barren plateau that lies between. While I can appreciate the importance of the location given the view it affords over the coastline at the Vietnam/Cambodia border, it must have posed extreme logistical difficulties for both sides. It couldn't have been too difficult to cut your enemy's supply lines as they barely existed in the first place.
After another three hours of misery on the way down, I was still aching all over the following day when we headed off to Kep. The plan at that stage was to have a look around town and maybe stay a
A fixer-upperer
Front of the old Bokor hotel/casino day or two before heading out to Koh Tonsay (Rabbit Island) off the coast. We took one look at the town and beach at Kep and decided to get on the boat immediately. The Lonely Planet decribes it as a "crumbling beach resort" but it looks to me as though it crumbled a long time ago. "Beach resort" was a stretch too. The only beach I saw made Port Melbourne beach look like some tropical idyll.
Heading to Koh Tonsay was a great option. Although I didn't like it quite as much as Bamboo Island, and it was a little more rustic, it was great to have some time out there to rest our damaged and weary bones. Once again Greg and I gave the frisbee a number of good, solid workouts in between our stints of lying on the beach reading.
One lasting memory I'll have of Koh Tonsay was of the wars fought between the animals on the island, which made for very entertaining viewing. Once while we were throwing the frisbee in the water, we looked across to see two pigs strolling along the beach. Apparently this had upset one of the dogs as he
Renevators' dream
Back of the hotel/casino began barking at them and trying to herd them off the sand. Defiantly, the pigs stood their ground, and eventually began advancing on the dog.
At that point, it seems the dog had called for reinforcements as three other dogs came charging over from a couple of hundred metres away and chased the pigs away. It appeared that the ducks and cows may have been involved in some sort of pact with the pigs, as moments later the dogs began roughing up the ducks, before fleeing in terror with a couple of cows in hot pursuit. The chickens and cats for their part seemed to be the Sweden and Switzerland of the region, remaining neutral. That being said, I thought I could sense some underlying tension between them as well.
While we ate most of our meals at the 'restaurant' near our huts, we did once venture further up the beach to try out wares of another. The menu looked substantially the same, but there was a fried noodles with chicken option that appealed to me. About five minutes after I placed my order we heard an awful din of clucking, at which point we looked over to
Front door of the Catholic Church
The Khmer Rouge fired shots back at the Vietnamese in the hotel from here the 'kitchen' in the nearby hut to see that the 'chef' was wringing a chicken's neck with his bare hands. My meal was rather tasty when it came out, and I certainly couldn't complain that it wasn't fresh.
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