Bokor Hill Station and Phnom Chhnork

The following day was another day of motorbike touring, this time to Bokor National Park and Phnom Chhnork.

Bokor National Park is a 1581 square kilometer park just outside of Kampot. It is home to a number of threatened species including leopard, Indian elephant, Asiatic black bear, Malayan sun bear, pileated gibbon, pig-tailed macaque, slow loris and pangolin. It is in the hills, so the climate at the top is much cooler. For this reason, it is also home to a former French hill station. They were always looking for somewhere to escape the heat (honestly I can't imagine what it's like here during the hotter seasons).

The drive up was fun--a fairly empty winding road through the jungle with frequent overlooks to stop at. Though we did both come very close to running out of gas. The gas mileage on these bikes is good, but mine only had a two liter tank. Fortunately we found someone at the top with a few bottles of gas for sale.

This is the Catholic church from the old hill station:

These days there's a huge ugly casino up top as well. National Parks in Cambodia seem to be run like our  parks used to be--all sorts of ridiculous bells and whistles like golf courses, casinos, etc.

After Bokor NP we headed off to try again to find Phnom Chhnork, a cave full of shrines. We'd looked on a map the day before and I had marked the turn off, but I could not for the life of me find it. We again had this problem. But this time we had a couple of new, very vague maps. So, we set off into the countryside knowing at least one of the turns we needed to make (though nothing is named or marked) and with a mild sense of the general direction that we needed to travel.

There was a great deal of dodging potholes, but we managed to not make any wrong turns, and finally found it with the help of two young girls. The cave itself was not terribly impressive, but it was interesting. There is a passage through from the top to the bottom, which we decided to attempt to figure out on our own using only our cell phones as flashlights. Before we started one of the young girls said to us, "Go without a guide and you will lose the way."

She was correct. We lost the way immediately and ended up back in the same chamber. The second time through we ended up with two guides. A boy of about six and a similarly aged monk followed us in and whenever we went the wrong way would just shout, "No!" at us. There is no way we would've found our way through without them.