Behind Kampot, a dark green mountain rises straight off the coastal plain and vanishes, more often than not, into its own cloud. This is Bokor, and the sealed road that switchbacks up it climbs out of the tropical heat into a cool, misty world that feels like a different country, and very nearly a different century.
A hill station in the clouds
The French built Bokor in the 1920s as an escape from the lowland heat, a hill station with a grand hotel and casino, a church and villas, all perched on a high plateau with the coast unrolling far below. War and time emptied it, and for decades the Bokor Palace stood abandoned in the fog, streaked red and black with lichen, one of the eeriest and most photographed ruins in the country. The old Catholic church nearby still keeps its lonely vigil on the ridge.
Mist, and the long view
The weather is the attraction as much as the buildings. Cloud pours over the plateau and clears again within minutes, so the view swings between a white wall of mist and a sudden, enormous panorama of the coast, the islands and the sea. It is cool enough up here for a jacket, a rare sensation on this coast, and the air smells of wet forest rather than salt.
The old and the new
Bokor is no longer purely a ruin. A large modern development has brought a new hotel and casino to the plateau, which sits uneasily beside the old ghosts for some visitors. But the national park around it is vast and largely wild, with waterfalls, a hilltop pagoda at Wat Sampov Pram, and forest that still shelters rare birds and animals. The ruins, the view and the mist remain the reasons to come.
How to be here
Go on a clear morning if you can, ride up by motorbike or car from Kampot, and bring a layer against the cool and the damp. Give the mountain time to open and close its curtain of cloud. The wait is part of the show.