Story: The Ghosts of Bokor Hill Station

Our bus bumped down stretches of dirt road and sailed along intermittent patches of pavement. From the window, a flat horizon separates the cerulean sky and bright green fields; a gentle breeze ripples through stalks of rice that appear to be waving 'hello, goodbye', just like the children on the side of the road who have emerged, naked, from a stream with brown, wet skin that sparkles in the sun. Big, billowy clouds with flat bottoms and rounded tops resemble the mountains in the distance–where we were headed, to a place called Kampot, a riverside town in Southwest Cambodia and home to Phnom Bokor, a mountain upon which a French ghost town is perched.

Several years prior, when I first learned about the Bokor Hill Station, I was immediately enthralled with the place. Abandoned places and things are like caffeine for my imagination. From ghost towns in California and Nevada to athletic shoes strung over city telephone wires, I have always been curious about the stories of the places and things people no longer want. Usually, their stories are hard to come by, but the history of the Bokor Hill Station is not unknown, and its story makes the place all the more intriguing.

The hill station was a colonial retreat, built by the French in the early 1920s–a complement to the neighboring beachside resort city of Kep, which is today also abandoned and strewn with ruins. Bokor was an “elegant getaway for French officials and foreign visitors” seeking temperate climes in the oppressive heat of Cambodia. From the top of the mountain, there are amazing views of the coastline–that is when the view isn't shrouded in fog, which is often; there are waterfalls, lush jungle, and wet evergreen and deciduous forests. In its day, Cambodia’s King Norodom had his summer palace up there on the mountain; a location fit for a king.

The French abandoned Bokor Hill Station in the late 1940s when fighting between the Vietnamese, French, and Khmer Issaraks forced evacuation. Affluent Khmers then used the Hill Station until the early 1970s, when it was converted into a base of operations for the Khmer Rouge. Eventually, the Vietnamese claimed the mountain and ruins when they liberated and then occupied Cambodia in the late 70s–they were its last occupants. In its history, the hill station has seen luxury and war and has been a place of sanctuary and battle. Today it stands in ruins, within the Bokor National Park, a mere skeleton of its former self, with bullet holes and graffiti on its walls.

The road to the hill station, at the top of the mountain, is a generous term for what looked more like a dry riverbed with man-eating pits, giant boulders, and deep ravines. There are segments of asphalt here and there–enough bits to remind you that there once was a proper road, but left to the decay of war and time, it has degenerated to nothing more than a tumultuous path in the jungle.

Just past King Norodom’s abandoned summer palace, the Bokor Hill Station emerges: a collection of crumbling buildings covered in red lichen and green moss, set upon a plateau on the edge of a cliff, with drifts of fog rolling in and curling around the framework of buildings like ghostly fingers. I felt like I was on the set of a horror movie and half expected to find vampires sleeping in the steeple of the old church. The fog came and went; one minute the entire view was completely obliterated by white mist, the next blue patches of sky and sun illuminated the entire plateau. Peering over the cliff's edge, down into the clouds below, it felt as if I was on the edge of the world and could be gobbled up and trapped in time by the swirling mist around my feet, just like Bokor’s ruins.

In addition to a church, there are remains of a police station, library, post office, casino, and hotel. The old hotel has been likened to the one in the movie The Shining, but to me, it felt more peaceful than horrific; the elegance of the past still permeates the ruined building, found in the patterned tiles on the floor, the curving staircases, the details of the woodwork, and what is left of the decorative windows. With some imagination, it is possible to hear the clink of wine glasses and the crackle of a fire in the massive dining room; to see women sunning themselves out in the garden; to smell trails of perfume lingering in the bed chambers; to feel the revelry of party-goers and happy gamblers having won fortunes in the casino.

I spent several hours exploring the Hill Station, feeling as if I'd somehow found passage to another dimension of time–with the waves of misty fog, revealing and hiding the stately silhouettes of abandoned buildings... there one minute, gone the next... Perhaps this is how the Bokor Hill Station lives on in the memories of those who spent time there: vacationers and soldiers alike. If the walls could tell stories, I wonder, what stories would they tell?