Bokor Hill Station

Yep, its the hauntingly beautiful and melancholic Bokor Hill Station pictured above. Photo taken from the Hill Station itself, the main building on the hill. It had this whole colonial-days-gone mood to it, Bokor itself, originally serving as a summer retreat for the French colonial staff, reflected in the now eerily empty grand ballroom in the hill station basement and the rustic fireplace.

Bokor's checkered past also include serving as a base for French colonial forces (the barracks and Catholic church still exist), then for the Khmer Issara nationalists fighting for independence, and in a last sorrowful chapter, as a place where invading Vietnamese troops fought the Khmer Rouge. The Catholic church, apparently, was where a major battle took place, the Vietnamese troops firing at Pol Pot's troops bunkered in a nearby casino less than 200 metres away.

You could almost feel the ghosts of the past and its history in the tendrils of mist that gathered around the abandoned structures and swirled around the cliff edge. Haunting, indeed, was the experience, walking, even in daytime, in and around the rooms of the once grand Bokor Palace hotel, through empty halls and corridors, and up and down the broad, crumbling stairways.

Left: Thats the basement of the Bokor Palace, note the fireplace on the left. The sheer emptiness of the hotel, which once must have been grand, and the plaster gathered on the floor just adds to the ghostly, hauntingly beautiful appeal of Bokor, like it has been left to the past and forgotten by the rest of the world.