Today we took a car first to Kampot for breakfast and then up to Bogor, the French hill resort. It was a surprisingly gentle ascent, though perhaps comparing it to Murree etc is silly (speaking of which I learned recently that Murree Brewery used to be run by the family of General Dyer of Jallianwala infamy). It was a hot and sunny day, and a pleasure to see the greenery change so gradually, though it never got to pines of course. The first stop was my favourite, at a great statue of a Cambodian female deity looking out to sea, with a row of Chinese zodiac creatures to one side. There was a little stream of people coming to worship her, notably a group of men we’d passed earlier urinating against the side of the road, one of whom wore a jacket embroidered ‘Glock fiend’. Below the statue was a ruined building with a carved portico and a terrace which must have once had the same view as the deity, before the trees grew up around it. This turned out to be King Sihanouk’s summer palace, surprisingly small, though with several little buildings including some that were swallowed up by vegetation. There was some elaborate grafitti in one, and another appeared to be the bathhouse as it was even tiled floor throughout, with some suspicious looking holes in the floor in some places.
The monkeys along the side of the road were very healthy looking, more so than most we’ve seen, and we passed a great many, most of them sitting on the barricade at the side of the road, their head turning to gawk at passing cars. Not that there were many.
We drove on past a construction site, a truly vast scar on what must have been a very pleasant site, where apparently there is a resort, casino and perhaps housing planned. The earth was scarred, the trees were dying, and there were piles of tyres everywhere. I had not known it takes so many tyres to build. We arrived at the waterfall, over some impressive rocks with clouds of small blue butterflies, though since it’s the dry season there was not much of a torrent. We clambered around a bit, and went down a path until it became too rough (I was in a long linen skirt and disinclined to let it rip) and then went back.
The next stop was at Bokor proper, at the wat on top of the hill. This was a pleasant mix of worn and very new. A very new statue of a lady dancing on the back of a crocodile, and a very temple with very rough frescoes of scenes from Buddhist stories on the ceiling. Worn stupas and statues with faded gilt and red dye, a ruined building or two, and an elderly nun seated in one shrine chanting by herself.
We decided to walk to the next stop, the ruined church. Google maps said it would be a 10 minute walk, but it soon became clear that the road it suggested simply didn’t exist, as it appeared to go across a grassy field that had once been cleared, but with no sign of a road, even a dirt road, under the tall sharp grasses.
The church wasn’t terribly interesting. A ruin of course, with plenty of graffiti, but all of the ‘Bob was here’ variety. It had been partitioned into two halves and in one half were a couple of rooms, and outside an ancient, overflowing squat toilet like a rural version of the one in Trainspotting, had been built, so I wonder if it had been used as a barracks or something at some point. In the larger half was a small altar with a rather jolly looking Jesus, his arms outstretched as though he were flying away, rather than suspended from a cross.
Outside was one of the inevitable signboards, with a map of Bokor and marking key sites, with the insignia of all the government departments and donors involved – and, oddly, a small text that blended into the rest of the logos, advising how one can tell if one is awake or in a lucid dream. ‘Read the text again,’ it advised. ‘If the words haven’t changed, you might be awake.’ I read it a couple of time and the words didn’t change; on the other hand, Google Maps seemed to point towards a lucid dream.
The final stop in Bokor was a palatial hotel, standing by itself on a cliff, seemingly abandoned. This was odd as, again, Google Maps suggested it was a function four-star hotel, with the more recent photos from two days earlier. It was clearly empty, though the jacuzzis were full of fresh water. Mist was rolling in over the cliff, rising from the thick greenery below.
We left for Kampot where we stopped for a Portuguese meal (surprisingly nice and it hit the spot) and then returned.