Kampot and Bokor National Park

Sunset over Bokor Mountain from our Guest House

Colonial buildings in Kampot

Back to Kampot for a week's holidays in coastal Cambodia.  This time we stayed in Kampot for two nights, planning on visiting Bokor National Park, famous for its ruined hill station at the top, as well as relatively intact forest and remaining biodiversity. 


Kampot's a lovely sleepy riverside town, again as in Cambodia's provincial towns, filled with decaying French colonial buildings and Chinese style shop fronts.

Guesthouse Kampot

The benevolent looking CCP leaders

We took an organised day trip into Bokor National Park, unfortunately these days it's not possible to visit independently, as the park (as with so much of Cambodia) has been leased to a Chinese company who are redeveloping the old French hill station into a modern Casino, hotel and resort complex... all with rather dubious funding and business planning.  Time will tell whether this will be profitable and what impact it will have on the park's biodiversity, as always the idea being income generated by the concession will pay for conservation activities.

Note the guard's AK is complete with
folding bayonet

The ruined casino

So the merry group of day trippers met at the park's entrance and transferred to the back of a pick-up and on into the park for a hour or so trek, then back on the pick-up for the last leg of the journey to the old hill station.  Our guide was an interesting chap, a supporter of the Khmer Rouge (the park was a Khmer Rouge stronghold until quite recently).  It's easy for us Phnom Penhers to overlook so much of these issues facing the country, but truth is many Cambodians fought with the Khmer Rouge, and many supported their ideas... the rural poor overthrowing the wealthy urbanites, something the current generation of Lexus driving city dwellers should not forget. 

The Ballroom

We didn't see any wildlife, but heard Gibbons calling, and it was good to be in the countryside again and to stretch our legs. 

Reaching the hill station wasn't quite as eerie as it might have been, passing the large casino construction site, but eerie none the less, faded charms of past riches...  According to accounts, during the Vietnamese invasion, Vietnamese troops were held up in the Catholic Church with Khmer Rouge in the old casino... saying that, there's no bullet scars on either building, so could be one for the tourists...

For more pictures, click here.