Bokor: an abandoned French resort in the fog

At the end of January 2016 we spent a few days in Kampot, a cozy little town in the south of Cambodia. On January 28 we rented a bike for three days, and on January 30 we rode it to Bokor National Park. It sits on a plateau at an altitude of about a thousand meters, and from Kampot we climbed up there by bike along a mountain road. And hidden at the top is an abandoned French town: in the early 1920s the French built a mountain resort here.

At the top we were met by fog. Along the empty road, only the silhouettes of old houses and streetlights emerged from it, and at the edge of the plateau it spilled over the cliff and flowed down like water.

The main building of the town is the former Bokor Palace hotel, opened in 1925; back then we just called it the casino. The resort was abandoned twice: in the late 1940s, during the Indochina War, and in 1972, when the Khmer Rouge took over the area. Now all that is left of the hotel is a huge gray box with empty windows, surrounded by scorched grass. We were not alone there: other tourists came too.

Nearby stands an old Catholic church, also built by the French in the early 1920s, out of dark stone.

Then we came out to the cliff. Below is a chasm overgrown with trees and bushes, but on that day it was covered with fog, and nothing at all could be seen below our feet. Sitting on a rock above that white void felt like being at the edge of the earth.

In the grass near the cliff we came across a small chameleon. After it crawled off a green blade of grass, it changed the color of the back part of its body right in front of us.

The fog kept creeping in and pulling back, and then the whole plateau opened up: a lake, the road, the church among the bushes, and from the edge, forest and a plain far below.