Meanwhile: The spirit world of the Elephant Mountains

James Pringle
Sunday, February 18, 2007
BOKOR, Cambodia

This once-opulent but long- abandoned hill town, located high above the sea on a spur of Cambodia's Elephant Mountains, is as evocative of French colonial days in Indochina as it is possible to get, down to the bottles of Bordeaux for sale at the forest ranger station.

When the stars blaze from the clear night sky and one sees the ghostly shadow of the deserted Bokor Palace Hotel at the edge of a 3,500 foot-escarpment, it is easy to imagine the orchestra playing prewar French favorites like "Valentine" by Maurice Chevalier, and numbers by his onetime lover, Mistinguett.

Colonial officials, rubber planters and their well-coiffed wives or mistresses would step out on the dance floor for the tango, rumba and Charleston.

Chips would click down on roulette tables in the nearby casino, now a deserted shell, as bow- tied attendants called "Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs."

But the screams of small apes calling to their mates in the cool night are the only nocturnal cries one hears today.

And at dusk Bokor resembles nothing so much as the setting of a Marguerite Duras novel like "The Lover" — or a spooky Hollywood movie. Nowadays, the population of the town is only 20.
Two girls come in to the ranger station for a dinner of rice, fish and winter melon soup, glad to escape the solitude, and easily imagined dangers.

Unfortunate, even terrible, events have really happened here. In the 1970s and '80s, the Khmer Rouge threw their victims over the nearby cliff, dead or alive, often tossing live grenades to finish them off. Skulls and human remains littered the jungle for years, until nature played its part.

The Cambodians, great believers in the spirit world, say Bokor is haunted.

Thai Vong, 29, my driver, who zig- zagged uphill for two hours over broken rubble on the once-tarred jungle track from Kampot, a town far below, suddenly dragged himself from the clifftop.
"Something was tugging my leg toward the edge," he nervously explained, insisting he was not, in turn, pulling my leg.

The first Western explorers reached the plateau in 1917, and in 1922 the hill station was founded, similar to the now tourist-clogged Vietnamese hill resort of Dalat, where the Emperor Bao Dai hunted tigers.

In the 1940s, in a microcosm of major conflict elsewhere, there was battling between Communist Viet Minh and French forces, then, in the 70s, fighting raged between the pro-Western Cambodian government and nascent Khmer Rouge.

The 1980s brought pitched battles between Khmer Rouge, holed up in the deserted Roman Catholic church, and invading Vietnamese forces holding the bullet-pocked hotel 500 yards away. Somehow the church's cross survived. Inside, a Khmer Rouge artist left a self-portrait on the wall.

Nowadays, there are still uniformed men armed with AK-47 rifles. But these are forest rangers employed to discourage illegal logging and to protect wildlife, which includes tigers, boar, bear, deer, python, deadly kraits and, in the more remote jungle, elephants.

Before arriving, I doubted that animals could have survived decades of fighting and bombing. But my doubts vanished as a large, black boar suddenly raced across our tracks.

The ranger, Vi Rang, 21, said he would not have shot the boar, even if it charged us.

"I'd have fired in the air, as I do to scare poachers and illegal loggers," he said.

All this is encouraging news to those who thought Cambodia's wildlife had disappeared. There is currently a debate on whether to devote all efforts to protecting what is now a national park or to encouraging more tourism, besides the iPod-toting backpackers now venturing to this unspoiled, magical time-warp.

Supporters say the largely mine-free Bokor would surely benefit from tourism. After all, as a senior ranger said, "Despite everything, the animals survived, and are even claiming back their land."