Bokor Mountain

PeaksKampot,Cambodia

A 1921 French hill station a thousand metres above Cambodia's coast, drowned in cloud for months and built at the cost of 900 workers' lives.

September·Peaking now

Jun–Oct

The southwest monsoon drowns the plateau, and rain-fed Popokvil thunders down both tiers — wettest and loudest through August and September.

Year-round The bullet-scarred church, the colonial ruins and the endemic pitcher plants are here all year; only the cloud, the waterfall and the clear Gulf view are seasonal.

Bokor Mountain is a French hill station a thousand metres above the Gulf of Thailand that spent seventy years being abandoned, fought over and swallowed by cloud. A palace hotel, a Catholic church and a water tower stand on an open plateau where damp sea air rides up the slope, cools, and drowns everything in white for months at a time. Cloud pours over the cliff edge and rubs out the view between one breath and the next. The church is the building to see: derelict, its walls pocked with bullet holes and covered in graffiti, its altar still carrying candles and flowers. It is one of the few colonial buildings up here that has been neither demolished nor rebuilt, because the ghost town is going. It was built at a terrible price. In nine months of 1921, French overseers drove Cambodian and Vietnamese workers up a jungle escarpment to cut a road and raise a retreat from the heat of Phnom Penh. Roughly 900 of them died of malaria, dysentery, exhaustion and rockfall. The French walked away in the late 1940s, returned in 1962, and left for good when the Khmer Rouge took the mountain in the early 1970s. The guerrillas held Bokor as one of their final strongholds into the 1990s, firing from inside the church. A 99-year lease signed in 2008 brought a new road, a casino resort and a giant statue of the folk guardian Yeay Mao, and in 2018 the Bokor Palace Hotel reopened as a working hotel. In the scrub grows Nepenthes bokorensis, a carnivorous pitcher plant with vessels the length of your hand that lives nowhere else. After the rains Popokvil Falls runs loud in two tiers.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come at first light and accept the gamble — the plateau often clears soon after dawn and clouds back in by mid-morning, so the ruins are sharpest before about 10am.
The cliff edge behind the Palace is the whole point — on a clear dry-season day the jungle drops away to the Gulf and the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc sits out on the horizon.
Look at the pitcher plants, but never pick one — uprooting Nepenthes bokorensis for photographs became common enough that Cambodia's environment ministry ran a public campaign to stop it.
Dress as if for another country — a thousand metres of altitude strips the coastal heat away, and riding up by scooter through drifting cloud turns cold and slippery fast.

Things to do

1
Step inside the bullet-scarred church
The shell of the Catholic church stands alone on open ground, its render blackened, its walls holed by gunfire, its altar still carrying candles. From there you can pick your way across the plateau's lichen-covered boulders to the old water tower on the skyline. The scale of what the French built up here only lands on foot.
2
Meet the crowded Buddhas of Wat Sampov Pram
The plateau's working temple is packed shoulder to shoulder with gilded Buddhas, painted disciples and green naga serpents, all of it lit by candles in the damp air. Monks and Khmer families come up here to make offerings while the fog presses against the doorway.
3
Catch Popokvil in full flood
Late in the monsoon the river comes over the lip in a brown, roaring sheet and drops through the jungle in two tiers, loud enough to hear before you see it. Come in the dry months and you get the honest version: a bare rock staircase with a trickle running down it.
4
Hunt for the pitcher plants in the scrub
Out on the open heath, Nepenthes bokorensis hangs its traps among the grass — hand-length vessels, furred with silvery hair, that drown the insects which fall in. The plant grows on this mountain and nowhere else in the world. Crouch, photograph, and leave it rooted.

Watch

Nearby

79 km