Bokor National Park

A forested mountain reserve rising to 1,079 metres in Cambodia southern Cardamom range, Bokor National Park is known for its abandoned 1920s French colonial hill station, the crumbling Bokor Palace Hotel, and cool cloud-forest conditions that contrast sharply with the coastal heat below.

The road to Bokor climbs through three distinct ecosystems — lowland palm and rice paddy, then dipterocarp forest, then cloud forest above 800 metres — and the temperature drops noticeably as you enter the upper zone, often falling to 15 degrees Celsius or below even in the dry season when the coast is in the thirties.

The Bokor Palace Hotel is the most famous relic of the colonial era: a four-storey French resort built in 1925 and abandoned after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, its elegant shuttered windows, grand staircase and ballroom intact but overgrown, giving visitors a rare glimpse of the luxury that once defined colonial Indochina.

Popokvil Waterfall, encountered on the drive up, is at its most powerful in the wet season when the cascade drops into a churning pool surrounded by forest; in the dry season it reduces to a thin ribbon of water over the same dark rock but retains its atmospheric setting.

The summit of Phnom Bokor reaches 1,079 metres and on clear days the view extends east across Kampot Province to the Vietnamese coast and west across the Cardamom Mountains; the summit is also the site of an active Buddhist monastery and a smaller preah yei (shiva lingam) shrine, showing how the mountain has been continuously sacred across different belief systems.

The cloud forest at the summit supports a distinctly different flora from the lowland forest: epiphytic ferns, moss-covered branches and orchids are common, and the moisture carried by the clouds supports species that are not found on the drier eastern slopes of the range.

Wildlife in the park includes a small population of gibbons, various hornbill species and the occasional Asian black bear; the park was formally designated a wildlife sanctuary in 1993 and remains one of the few large-scale protected areas in the Cardamom region.

The experience of Bokor is inseparable from its historical layered quality: the colonial luxury hotel, the Khmer Rouge mountain base, the active Buddhist shrine and the natural forest coexist in a single landscape that has absorbed multiple Cambodian histories without resolving them into a single narrative.

The new Bokor City Resort development visible from the park entrance represents the most significant contemporary pressure on the park, with a planned casino, hotels and residential development near the summit that has attracted criticism from environmental groups and been subject to legal challenges.

The combination of cool highland climate, colonial ghost hotel and cloud forest is unlike any other site in Cambodia.

The drive itself is a microcosm of Cambodia's ecological diversity, moving rapidly through three distinct vegetation zones.

The park is easily combined with the nearby town of Kampot, known for its riverside restaurants and pepper farms, making it an effective two-day itinerary.