Bokor Hill Station: Holiday Resort, Torture Chamber & Movie Set
I visited Bokor Hill Station, Cambodia in late 2005, after spending a few months working in Laos. Cambodia was a palpable cultural shift after Laos, the stench of the Khmer Rouge atrocities still hung in the air. While in Phnom Penh we'd visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum otherwise known as the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21), used by the Khmer Rouge as a interrogation and torture centre from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. And as most every tourist does, we'd travelled out of the city, into the countryside to the Killing Fields. Both places left a lasting impression on me, that's almost to impossible to express in words. The fact that when visitors to both places wander round them, they do so in abject silence speaks volumes. We soon left the manic insanity of Phnom Penh and sometime before the New Year we made our way to a small town in the south-east of the country called Kampot. A quiet, often eerie riverside place of wide empty boulevards and decaying French colonial buildings. Kampot was an un-nerving town of drugged-up zombie back-packers staggering about and sickening sexual predators hiding in the shadows. We weren't planning on staying long, we'd only come there for one thing, to visit the abandoned Bokor Hill Station nearby.
|
Bokor Hill Station is a ghost town, with a history as weird and creepy as the derelict buildings that sit atop the remote mountain plateau, over looking the Gulf of Thailand. The small resort town was constructed over nine months, opening on Valentine's Day 1925. French colonists used forced Cambodian prison labourers from Kampot province, over 900 of who died during the construction of the town and the road leading up to it. The centre piece of the town was the grand Bokor Palace Hotel. For some 20 years it was used as an escape for the colonists, wanting to get away from the oppressive heat and humidity of Phnom Penh. During the First Indochina War, which started in 1946, the hotel was used as a hospital.
|
|
However it had to be abandoned after an armed faction of the Khmer Issarak, known as Black Dragon set fire to the hotel. In the aftermath of the war, the Khmers revived the town as a tourist resort. And in 1962, King Norodom Sihanouk officially reopened the Bokor Palace Hotel and added a casino. But with the rise of the Khmer Rouge that soon came to an end, as by 1972 Bokor Hill and the territory around was under their control. It remained under Khmer Rouge control right through into the 1990s. Even holding strong during the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. The buildings still held the scars of battle, when we visited it. Wandering around the desolate hill top and through the hotel, tour guides related blood curdling stories of Khmer prisoners being taken there to be tortured, and how many of them were thrown off the mountain side at the back of the hotel.
|
|
When we went there in 2005, getting to the top was arduous slog. A 32 km unrelenting grind taking over an hour and a half in the back of a pick-up truck, on a heavily pot-holed and rock strewn road that had all but turned into a river bed, being the only way to reach the top of the 3540 ft peak. Heading back as soon as dusk began to fall, as no locals wanted to be up there at night. With talk of evil spirits and ghosts of the many people that had died there over the years, wandering the hotel and hill at night.
Since 2012 however a new road has been built up to the hill station, and new construction and renovation is under-way, in an attempt to exercise the ghosts of the past. A new hotel and casino, The Thansur Bokor Highland Resort hotel opened in 2012, and there are plans for shops, a golf course and other tourist facilities. The old hotel has been given a face-lift, and there are plans to eventually renovate it to its original grandeur. I guess that's progress, I'm just glad that I got to see the place in its full state of dereliction. |
|
The world may have now lost an infamously creepy ghost town to commercial developers. But before they got their hands on it, thankfully a South Korean movie crew got there first. R-Point (알 포인트) is a 2004 South Korean supernatural horror movie, that used Bokor Hill Station and the Bokor Palace Hotel as its main back-drop.
|
The movie is actually set during the Vietnam War, so Bokor Hill doubles as a French colonial mansion and surrounding plantation in Vietnam. The clip from the movie above, shows the Korean army platoon encountering the "mansion" for the first time, where they will set-up base and the majority of the movie is set. Using it to its full creepy effect, particularly most all the scenes featuring the building occur at night. R-Point is not only a decent supernatural horror movie, but captures the true eeriness of the Bokor Palace Hotel as it once was.
|
Tracking Down The Atomic Beast: Survival Town & Yucca Flats - Less than a 100 miles from Las Vegas is the infamous nuclear test site at Yucca Flats, home to the remnants of Survival Town.
|
Monroeville: Mall Of The Dead - The biggest character in the cult zombie horror Dawn Of The Dead, the shopping mall, located just 10 miles east of Pittsburgh, PA.
|