Ghostly

Yesterday, I have arrived in Kampot, a small river town between Sihanoukville and Kep. I'm staying at Kampot Guest House at a horrendous rate because it was the only room still available since it's Khmer New Year and Cambodians are travelling during the holidays.

I booked a tour for today, in a 4 wheel drive to the Bokor Hill National Park and up to Bokor Hill Station. Bokor Hill Station is an abandoned French town built in 1922 to offer the colonial French settlers an escape from Phnom Penh. The Bokor Hill resort had a Palace Hotel, a Casino, Shops, a post office, a church and Royal apartments. During the Khmer Rouge Regime it offered housing to the Khmer Rouge officials and was then destroyed during the invasion of the Vietnamese in 1979.
Today, most of the buildings are still there, but they are in ruins and abandoned.
After a really bumpy 3 hour ride in the back of a truck we were left to explore the ghost town up on the hill which really seems like a film set from a horror movie. Especially the old Bokor Palace Hotel was pretty spooky and I didn't really expect to see a church sitting there on the top of a hill in Buddhist Cambodia. It was great fun though, and the other dudes on the tour were very entertaining, two Czechs, 4 Australians, one Irish and two Canadians.
After lunch we hiked a bit through the jungle and then got back on the truck to catch a boat back to Kampot.

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