cambodia :: day four :: part one :: boo from bokor
the man took center stage in the crumbling palace and proceeded to pantomime. he bent his legs and faked a strong grip on a big imaginary machine gun. and then he started shooting, fueling his fire with the cops-and-robbers sounds that kids make, shaking his body and turning from side to side, spraying his made-up bullets through large windowless openings, flying them over the thick jungle and in to the distant waters of the gulf of thailand.
then the man brushed his hands clean and laughed. without speaking a word, he had said what he wanted to say: not too long ago, the guns and the bullets were real. not too long ago — as recently as the late 1990s — the vast jungles of preah monivong national park were home to the last remnants of the khmer rouge.
but, tourists are assured, preah monivong national park — or “bokor,” as it is commonly known — is now safe to visit. and, curiously, unlike the rest of cambodia, the area is said to be free of landmines, the lasting legacy of 30 odd years of war. still, you are advised to stay on well-worn paths.
bokor park, packed with dense tropical forest and hidden waterfalls, is one of cambodia’s largest protected natural areas. and looking down on it all, from its perch 3,542 feet above sea level, is the bokor hill station, a tourist attraction with a kind of cult following. you can roam through the ruins of a long-deserted resort community built by the french in the 1920s. one hyperbolic travel writer went so far as to call the ghost town “the eeriest place in the world.”
well, that’s debatable (prior to my daily-maid-service days, there were times when my bachelor pad bathroom was pretty damn eerie), but of one thing i am fairly certain: the road that leads to bokor, the long, arduous one that winds up and around the mountain, is still the same road that was built in the 1920s … and it has not been maintained since.
when i finally got to the top, after a two-hour ride from kampot, my knees ached. i felt like i had run the route. i hadn’t, of course — i traveled on the back of a yellow 250 cc dirt bike … sandwiched between two cambodian brothers named jack and john (“nuts to butts,” as my friend brian might say). john, the younger of the two, wore a green t-shirt that said “wayne county youth cheerleaders.” he also carried a pink hello kitty backpack.
also along for the trip was a foursome from finland, who traveled two to a motorbike and looked like extras from the beach. they were friendly, but didnÃÂt talk much (in english, at least). one conversation i remember having was about malaria medication, which is recommended when traveling in cambodia. we happened to have the same drug, doxycycline. only i was still taking mine — side effects forced them to stop.
“made her suicidal, her paranoid and him really grumpy,” one of the tattooed and dreadlocked guys said, pointing to his friends.
“and what about you?” i asked.
“made me sick of dealing with them.”
jack, employed by the mealy chenda guesthouse — which, other than that colossal cockroach i talked about, is actually an ok place to stay — was our guide for the day. he led us on a 3-mile hike through the rainforest, a route on which he has seen wild elephants in the past (“but only small ones,” he noted). the hike culminated with a walk behind and into the two-tiered popokvil falls.
jack, 29 and lean, stripped to his underwear and walked right under the water. he took a seat on some slick rocks, an area where the flow was particularly heavy. he leaned back and let the water envelop him. he looked over toward us and unfolded a huge cambodian smile.
“it’s wonderful!” he shouted. “come!”
and so we followed suit (well, some of us had suits). and it was nice … once your body got accustomed to the frigid water. we bathed in the falls and ate lunch next to them. then, we hopped back on our bikes and headed to bokor hill station.
note from dan: on the topic of malaria medications, it’s been more than two weeks since i returned from cambodia … and i’m still popping the doxycycline pills. you are supposed to do so for four weeks after leaving a malaria-infected country. there were actually several days last week when i forgot to take my pill. i just started up again over the weekend. not sure what effect this will have on me. but i am certain that the pill i took on an empty stomach an hour go is seriously screwing with my body. my hands are cold. my head is hot. and before my eyes are thousands of little dots. am i turning finnish? regardless, i think i am going to go lie down. i will finish this tomorrow.
bokor hill station is a bizarre place. its past grandeur is apparent, but it is in a serious state of disrepair and cloaked in an odd, rust-colored moss. included in the once-majestic, long-uninhabited mountaintop settlement are a casino, a post office, a catholic church and mansion-like hotel named bokor palace.
all were built by french colonialists in the 1920s … and deserted in the 1940s, when vietnamese and free khmer forces overtook it during their fight for independence from the french. the area was vacated again in 1970 when the khmer rouge began to take control of the cambodian countryside. since then, the hill station’s primary occupants have been soldiers: khmer rouge guerrillas and the vietnamese. as the man with the imaginary machine gun said, the area was home to the fierce and bloody battles.
and gory info like that just makes an already creepy place creepier. when the clouds overtake the mountain it’s like a scene from scooby doo. you start hoping for the harlem globetrotters to show up or for scooby to take a bite out of the fog for some comic relief. this happened — the clouds, not the globetrotters or scooby — to carla, one of the girls i met my first night in phnom penh. she was wandering alone deep inside the old hotel, when all of a sudden the sky went dark and bokor palace started to feel like disney’s haunted mansion … only scary. she panicked, and raced through the building’s mazelike corridors in search of a way out.
when there are no clouds, the spectacular view from bokor hill station — full of steep drop-offs, jungle, sea and little else — explains what the french were thinking when they decided to develop the area more than 80 years ago. it also explains why the mountaintop was a valuable tactical location during the many wars cambodia has seen over the years. the hill station is rarely crowded — when we went, we were the only tourists — so it’s a nice place to collect your thoughts before the grueling motorbike trip back down the mountain.
but down the mountain, back in kampot, is where i had the most fun this day. jack and i became friends — which isn’t hard to do when you spend four hours of the day holding on to someone’s waist — and he took me out for a cambodian evening you won’t find written up in any guidebooks.
for more of dan’s cambodia photos click here.
UPDATE: um, yeah. about the remaining six or seven stories about cambodia … well, they are on the back burner along with many other fizzled projects. you see, when an assignment comes along that actually pays me money, it tends to take priority.
12.16.2003, 9:34 PM · Cambodia