Kampot sits just east of Bokor National Park – a huge forested area sprawling over a range of hills that look out over the south coast. At the turn of the 20th century one of the park's summits was colonised by the French as a retreat from the intense Cambodian heat, and turned into a holiday town complete with a post office, church, hotel and casino. The town was abandoned to the Khmer Rouge in the mid-70s, and terminally damaged in 1979 when the hill-top became the site of one of the Khmer 's last stands against the Vietnamese. Having scaled a sheer cliff face to reach the town the Vietnamese occupied the post office, and attacked the Khmer-held Catholic church a couple of hundred metres away. After the battle, the remains of the town lay abandoned for some 30 years, given over to local wildlife including tigers, bears and porcupines.


This neglect ended in 2000, when the hill was bought by Sokha Industries, a Japanese conglomerate that seems to own at least half of the tourist offerings in Cambodia (they even own the tourism rights to the Angkor temples). Sokha is now in the process of revitalising Bokor's status as a playground for the rich by building a new casino and 5* hotel on the mountain, serviced by what is probably the best road in all Cambodia. This project seems to employ most of the local population in all manner of tasks, from checking every square inch of the new road with little hammers, to bulldozing the forest and turfing the hillside leading to the casino. We're not quite clear as to what effect this turf will have on increasing revenues, but clearly someone seems to think that green grass is integral to the 5* experience. The turfing process was incredibly interesting for us to watch (no really): a daisy chain link of 25 people stretched up the hillside, passing down wicker baskets of earth and passing up small pieces of turf, in a human chain. We've never seen anything quite like it.

We took a day trip into Bokor to get to the summit, and trekked up through a 2km stretch of the forest, guided by a 'ranger' in full park keepers' uniform, armed with an AK47. It seems that this was more of a gimmick than anything else, as the most dangerous thing we saw were butterflies! However, the walk itself was pretty hard-going, involving scrambling up steep rocks and avoiding the creepers that threatened to trip you up at almost every step, all in super-humidity. I have never seen a human being sweat as much as James did during the climb. It's left us both excited about proper trekking in Borneo, although I for one am not sure James will survive it without an IV fluid drip.