In the ruined ballroom of the Bokor Palace Hotel it is easy to imagine, amid the shattered floor tiles and mouldy walls, the clink of champagne flutes and lively chatter of a night out in this tiny colonial hill station.
A symbol of both the excesses of Cambodia’s golden age and the apocalypse that followed, the long abandoned — some say ghostly — hotel and casino is now only haunted by curious tourists wandering among its dank rooms and tiny hallways.
A group of foreigners, perhaps looking for something tangible to link this old shell to the horrors they imagine have been committed here, talked excitedly during a recent visit about “bullet holes in the walls”.
“It looks like someone was lined up and shot,” said Rob Chapman, a British national travelling with two friends from Germany.
Indeed, a bricked up window at the rear entrance to the hotel does appear riddled with bullet holes. But whether this is grim evidence of an execution, or merely the result of repeated looting, will never be known.
The truth is forever lost under a shroud of mystery that is part of Bokor’s appeal to those willing to make the three-hour climb to the top of this 1 000m rocky outcrop overlooking the sea in Cambodia’s Elephant Mountains.
But terrible events have occurred among the mist-covered ruins here; from disconsolate gamblers hurling themselves off a nearby cliff to vicious battles between the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese troops who controlled different parts of the small town during the 1980s.
The Bokor hill station was founded in 1922 and soon evolved into a popular retreat for French colonial functionaries eager to escape the heat of the capital, Phnom Penh, several hundreds kilometres to the north.
In the 1960s it was a party-goer’s paradise. Then-prince Norodom Sihanouk — a renowned bon vivant — had a lavish home a few kilometres down the mountain and the hotel-casino hosted grand soirees for Cambodia’s elite.
“It must have been madness up here — it must have been like Nice,” said Chapman, surveying the hotel and its cluster of buildings dotting the wind-swept mountaintop.
A Roman Catholic church, an artefact of Bokor’s colonial founders where the Khmer Rouge sought refuge during their duels with the Vietnamese, remains almost intact on a nearby hillside.
“My grandmother said this place was very happy. It was a small town but it had everything. The king liked this place,” said Ek Chenda as she served noodles and boiled eggs to a handful of Cambodian tourists.
Standing beneath a blue tarpaulin in the shadow of the hotel, the 41 year-old sells snacks and drinks to visitors who arrive by the truckload to wander through the ruins.
“Last year was better for tourists — this year has not been so good because of the road. The small cars cannot come up,” she said.
Long, tough ride
Traversing the 30 or so kilometres to the top is a hard slog, with motorists finding only the briefest moments of relief on small islands of asphalt, their ragged edges crumbling into deep, rocky ruts.
Visitors most frequently arrive packed into pick-up trucks or Toyota Camrys with the suspension jacked high off the ground.
The Bokor ruins are inside the Bokor National Park, which was established in 1993 and covers 1 580 square kilometres of rough, mountainous country.
The park’s fragile environment is under constant threat from illegal logging and poaching, conservationists say, stirring the debate over whether it should be further developed to accommodate the increasing numbers of tourists flocking to Cambodia.
About 1,7-million foreign arrivals were recorded last year, marking a 20% increase over 2005.
“It took me three hours to ride up here,” complained one motorcyclist, a foreigner who gave his name as Philippe. “If they want to develop this place they’re going to have to fix it.”
After the Khmer Rouge abandoned Bokor, locals climbed the mountain to pillage what they could from the cluster of remaining buildings.
“I came here first in the mid-1990s and it is like what you see now. In the 1980s, after the Khmer Rouge, the people came to strip away everything that they could sell,” said Ek Chenda.
Great gusts of white fog drift through the ragged scrub, bringing a cold wetness that — in this tropical country — is as unsettling as the eerie outline of the abandoned buildings that rise suddenly out of the landscape.
“I feel sad — it’s strange to hear such stories about this place and then everything was destroyed. Those stories seem so unbelievable to me now,” she added. — AFP