Bokor Face

I had really wanted to visit Bokor Hill Station and in fact had skipped a side-trip to a floating village in order to keep the hill station on the itinerary. The draw is the remnants of a French colonial town from the early 20th century that was abandonned in 1945. The ruins are still perched on the hill and you are free to wander around in these old, atmospheric buildings. There is an attempt underway to redevelop this area and I wanted to see it while it is still filled with the old ruins, instead of modern shops and coffee houses.

We discovered that it was pretty much impossible to get a tour from our beach town of Sihanoukville with so few tourists around, so we headed for Kampot, which is a sleepy town with little more than tours to the hill station. Unfortunately, the rain continued and we were informed that a tour was impossible because the solitary road up the hill was impassable. (The road had previously been closed due to the redevelopment efforts, but my understanding was that the tour operators had found a way around that.)

I have to admit to being a little broken hearted. I had really hoped to see this before it became a construction site, or worse yet, absorbed into the modern world.

After dinner, back at the guesthouse, Jennifer and I reflected on the fruitlessness of our last three days. We had driven 6+ hours in an old bus to arrive at a beachtown in the pouring rain. We did not get any sun or go swimming in the ocean. Our only real beach time was at night during an absolute downpour. The wall of our guesthouse leaked from the rain. The storms kept us awake at night and also drove some insects (including a large flying one) into our room. The guesthouse had a nice menu, but awful mojitos. We searched the entire town for a second-run movie theater that ended up being right up the street from our guesthouse and wasn't showing the movie we were told would be playing. We also could not find the movie on DVD. (We found THE DVD shop in town, which only had German language discs. Go figure!) We entered practically every clothing store in town, but yielded only one tee shirt between the two of us. We had to travel to Kampot, which is barely on the map, to find our tour. It took us four tries to find a reasonably clean guesthouse. The entire block which contained the town's two internet cafes lost power as soon as Jennifer walked in. Most of the restaurants in town were closed at dinner time, including the one we set out to find. We ate Lok Lak (stir fried beef with pepper sauce) which was so chewy that it was like gnawing on silly putty. Because of it, we ended up using toothpicks for 20 minutes and went to bed with sore gums. We had to wander through unlit back streets to find our way back to our guesthouse; since we had forgotten our flashlights, we had to use the light from our cell phones. And our tour, which was the entire reason for the diversion to the south coast, was cancelled.

Of course, we laughed to the point of tears the entire time we jointly recounted this series of misfortunes. Jennifer put it best when she summarized our adventure as "useless, but fun!"