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Bokor
National
Park Cambodia Trekking
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Bokor Cambodia, Bokor national park, Bokor Hill
Station,
Cambodia trekking,
dirt bike tours, tourism of
Cambodia.
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Bokor national park
is in Kampot, there is tree
and bamboo jungle,
great waterfalls and some scenery out of a horror
movie.
In the
wilds of southern Cambodia it's a real
highlight, a
nature perspective in a totally different
direction as
Angkor Wat.
Bokor Cambodia should be
on any travel plan when visiting the country,
its only a few hour with the bus from Phnom Penh
over a good road to Kampot. Bokor national park
tours are available every day, just talk with
the hotel they arrange everything.
One of the
best tours in Cambodia,
a bit to the west is
Sihanoukville and from there the bus is waiting
to Koh Kong with more great nature destinations
that's travel with a different twist,
no ruins, no temples, just waterfalls,
wilderness, rivers and ideal for dirt biking,
Cambodia trekking and dirt bike tours can be
done up to the Bokor Hill Station and around.
A young man is
our tour guide for the trek at the Bokor National Park
in Kampot,
the idea is to climb Bokor mountain via Cambodia
trekking all the way up to the Bokor hill
station. The guide's connection to nature is not
really shared by this
boatful of townies, he's constantly grabbing
waxy leaves, pointing out how this and that one can cure
hemorrhoids and solve other health problems. What do we eat for such problems at home?
Tablets, we tell him. At the end of of our
trekking group a soldier follows us with the
"Kalashnikov" wild animals are still around and
the civil war is not so many years ago.
Currently (2011) the whole road from Kampot
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up and
down Bokor mountain is under construction to
make a about 8 meters wide asphalt roadwhich
is a difficult undertaking considering the
terrain, before it was only a dirt road. The basic road
into the park is
already finished and also the asphalt cover is
done for around 50% of the distance (2011), but the
trekking group climb down from the back of the truck and
off we go into the quiet forest, we call it
Cambodia trekking, the truck will move on
without us and wait a couple of kilometers
further up at the meeting point we will reach in
about 2 hours. The trek is a constant climbing
and the trail is over slippery earth, limestone
boulders, through the bamboo jungle and plenty
of other lush tropical jungle. The thickets are very dense
from time to time which makes
the walk difficult on top of it there are
constantly sharp broken bamboo pieces popping
out from the earth i guess everyone can imaging
what happen when losing balance and fall into
this bamboo spears, means good
shoes are mandatory and some gloves will avoid
cuts.
Cambodia Travel
Bokor National Park
Waterfall
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husks, and nibble the leaves of
an edible fern, we even find
some wild aloe vera. Crossing small streams, all
together ideal tours to
Cambodia. We move into the deeper
forest. Has the tour guide ever seen an elephant? "They're
easy to find," he says. "You just cut down a big
tree, the elephant hears the bang and comes
along to eat the sweet leaves from the treetop."
Beside of
hiking and trekking there is
"Dirt Bike Cambodia",
considering the bad condition of
the roads or often no road at
all, but a small trail dirt bike
tours make sense,
read more.
Suddenly there's such a crash
that I imagine a parachutist has
strayed into the trees, but then
the biggest bird I've ever seen
is descending ahead of us,
successive branches snapping
under its weight. A curved beak
bigger than its body, protruding
from a yellow casqued, crunches
back some kind of nut. Then the
hornbill (as I find out later)
flaps away in an ungainly flurry
of black wings and claws. Our
second bird encounter at Bokor
mountain, though we never see
it, is more significant. It's a
type that
feeds on whatever tigers leave
behind, it means a tiger is
likely to be nearby. Several
long minutes later the call
fades and the tiger, if it was
ever there, is gone.
Misty view
of the Cambodia coast,
looking down from the Bokor plateau where the blackened shell of the Bokor
Palace Hotel and Casino still smolders. Once the
playground of French colonialists, later
occupied by Vietnamese soldiers, the walls of
this grand structure are now a mosaic of soft
red lichen, bullet holes and graffiti. It
is possible to book accommodations at the Bokor
hill station at the Ranger HQ. As night falls, above the
sawmill screech of countless insects I can make
out the faint whistling of a female gibbon,
mocking my failure to find a single primate. |
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When I got back to Sihanoukville
next day, there on the roof of
my cabin, wearing a "where have
you been?" expression, is a
rhesus monkey.
Cambodia can be reached from
Changi Airport
or Air Asia from
Bangkok Airport or
Kuala Lumpur Airport LCC terminal are the
most economic routings.
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