The Cardamom Mountains are one of the largest unbroken rainforests left in mainland Southeast Asia, a 300-kilometre range you can walk into for days without crossing a road. They stand on the wettest ground in Cambodia: the southwest monsoon breaks against the seaward slopes and rains itself out for half the year, feeding rivers that run cold and clear over rock. Under that canopy live 62 globally threatened animals, 450 kinds of bird and Cambodia's largest population of wild elephants. The forest also holds an animal the world had written off. The Siamese crocodile was thought extinct in the wild until a survey team found it here in 2000. In 2024 sixty hatchlings emerged from five nests along the park's rivers, the species' largest recorded wild breeding in a century, out of a world population of a few hundred.
You hear this forest long before you see anything in it. Gibbons open up in the first hour of light, a whoop that carries far through the trees; after dark, fireflies pulse along the riverbanks. Most trips begin at Chi Phat, a village of former loggers and poachers running its own ecotourism scheme since 2008 — the guide ahead of you may once have hunted the ridge. You trek for days, sleep in a hammock, swim in the cold pools below Tatai Waterfall, and stay in bungalows moored on the river between mangroves and forested hills. Most of the range is national park now, Southern Cardamom and Central Cardamom Mountains both declared in 2016. Rangers haul wire snares out by the thousand and have recorded no elephant poaching since 2006, while plantations, roads and dams press at the edges. Come without expectations: elephants, sun bears and clouded leopards are all in there, and you will almost certainly not see one.