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The road up Bokor Mountain near Kampot, Cambodia (see the Ghosts of Bokor posting) has been closed since the beginning of 2008. According to the report, the road has been closed to undergo a much needed repair and resurfacing by Cambodian petrochemical giant Sokimex. The repairs are expected to take 30 months.

So, this means no visits to the ghost town for another two and a half years.

So I decided to spend the weekend in Vientiane. It’s been a couple years since I was there last, and Thai Airways is selling RT tickets to Udorn Thani for 2,500 Baht, which is cheaper than Nok Air, and less than a quarter of what it costs to fly directly to Vientiane.

Of course, saving money costs time in this case. You have to take a van from the airport in Udorn to the bridge at Nong Khai, but it’s a good road and an easy drive. A busload of Vietnamese school kids hits Lao immigration at the same time, so there’s a bit of a wait, but I still get to my hotel in time to freshen up before dinner.

I’m staying at the Tai-Pan, which was my second choice. The ‘good’ rooms at the Inter City were taken. On second look, I’m kind of glad I didn’t get the Inter City. The outside is looking very run-down. However, a few doors down from it is a new hotel called the Lao Orchid, which looks quite nice.

My room at the Tai-Pan is comfortable enough. The bathroom has been recently re-done. It’s not posh, but it’s functional and clean. There’s also high-speed internet in my room, which was unexpected, and I didn’t bring my laptop. There’s some PC’s in the lobby you can use for $2 an hour. The quality was faster than the leased line in my office in Bangkok, so the hour lasted me my whole stay.

Not much has changed in Vientiane. This has to be the slowest-paced capital city in Southeast Asia. I did note that they were laying tracks from the Friendship bridge when I arrived, so I guess some day you’ll be able to take a train from Bangkok to Vientiane, although I can’t say the idea appeals much.

Saturday morning I visit the morning market, which is mis-named since nothing is open at 9:00. About a third of the market has been torn down. I don’t know what the plan is, but a lot of shops have moved into the new ‘mall’ next to the market, which is really just an indoor version.

I head out to the Buddha park, which is about the only ‘major’ sight I haven’t seen. It’s this large park on the banks of the Mekong filled with concrete statues of Buddha along with some gods and creatures from Asian mythology. Very surreal.

Back in town I head to Makphet, a training restaurant run by the same organization that operates Friends in Phnom Penh. I try the chicken salad, which turns out to be an adaptation of the popular Lao dish “larb” but made with shredded chicken breast and lots of bean sprouts. It’s the most delicious meal I’ve had in a long time.

After lunch, I look around some of the shops. Although there’s a lot of junk, and a lot of ’souvenirs’ that really come from Vietnam, there are a few good items, especially textiles. I even run across a few real antique shops. I buy a silk shirt from a shop near the fountain and then stop in at Jomo’s for a coffee and a chocolate chip cookie.

Sunday morning it’s back across the bridge and home to Bangkok.

Photos of the Buddha Park can be found in the gallery. An updated guide to Vientiane is now on-online.

I’ve finally cleared the big backlog of updates I had stacked up from my travels, and with the arrival of cool weather in Bangkok I decided to re-visit some old places in Bangkok to see what’s new. I started at Wat Po to check out a report that the entry fee has gone up (true – it’s now a whopping 50 Baht). Even with the increased admission price, the area around the chapel housing the reclining Buddha is mobbed with tourists. I skip the statue and make my way around to the south side of the temple to gain access to the ordination hall in its double cloister.

The base of the hall is lined with stone plaques depicting the Ramakien, the Thai version of the Indian epic story of the Ramayana. The tables were in fact rescued from a ruined temple in Ayuthaya and installed in Wat Po by the first king of Bangkok. Back 20 years ago, children selling rubbings of these stones used to throng every tour bus that stopped at the temple. Even then, people hardly ever visited the source of the pictures, and they still don’t today. The courtyard is completely empty and there are just a few Thais praying in the hall, which has one of the most beautiful altars in Bangkok.

From the ordination hall I make my way further back in the temple, to the massage area. The buildings where the massages are usually given is under renovation, as is much of the temple, but there’s a tent in the corner were you can still get a massage from the place where it all began. You can even learn the art of Thai massage for yourself at their nearby school. A degree Thai massage from Wat Po is still the most valuable certificate in the business.

I leave the temple by the rear exit and cross the street to Saranarom Park. There’s not much new here, except for a small ‘village’ of traditional Thai wooden houses representing the different regional styles. The houses are about half scale, so you can’t go inside them. I exit the park near the Victorian styled greenhouse. The exit faces the Lord Canal, and there’s a ‘Dutch’ drawbridge over the canal right in front of the park exit.

Crossing the Dutch bridge puts me just a few steps down from Wat Ratchabophit. The entrance to the temple from this side is through the royal cemetery, with its curious mix of Gothic and Thai styled mausoleums. Some of them mix both architectural styles in one building. In addition to the cemetery, another unusual aspect of the temple is the circular rather than square cloister that surrounds the big pagoda (chedi) at the center of the monastery. You can access the cloister through gates on the east and west sides of the cloister. The ordination and prayer halls are built into the north and south sides of the ring. As if that weren’t unique enough, all the walls are covered with painted ceramic tiles. These led some guide book to dub this the ‘benjarong temple’, which is a pretty good description. Don’t miss the doors of the outer wall, which are carved into rather cartoon-ish depictions of sailors, royal cavaliers and other figures in uniform.

I leave the temple through the east gate. I’m not sure, but I think this is the street I’m looking for. I walk up a few blocks and confirm that I’m on Tanao Road, and about the same time come to the large intersection where I can see the Giant Swing down on the right. A short block up from here is the alley housing the small Chote Chitr restaurant. This modest little place has somehow found its way into restaurant reviews from the likes of the New York Times. As I’m alone, I just order some Vietnamese sausage fried rice, which is very good.

Fed and rested, I move on to Wat Suthat and the Giant Swing. The swing was re-built this year and re-dedicated by the king in September, but it looks pretty much the same. Inside the temple, the 150 Buddha images that line the cloister are all in the processes of being re-gilded. They were once in various states of disrepair.

Leaving Wat Suthat, I walk up Dinso Road to the Democracy Monument, and then down Ratchadamnoen Road to Wat Ratchanada. The temple is home to another quirky structure, the Loha Prasat, or metal monastery. The building is based on Sri Lankan temple designs and took more than 150 years of on-again off-again construction to complete. The name comes from the fact that the roof is made of cast iron, which gives it its black color. Just inside the gate there’s a table with the Buddhas for the different days of the week set up; a cat sleeps nestled up against the Wednesday night Buddha. There’s a new illustrated display of the building’s history and construction installed in the ground floor. The narrative is in Thai, but there are lots of photographs and illustrations. The upper floors catch a nice breeze, so I sit and cool off for a while in the shade before moving on. From the top floor, there’s a good view of the Golden Mount as well as Wat Suthat.

The temple is also home to an old and well known amulet market. What with the recent Jatukam craze, amulets are more popular than ever, but that’s also meant there are small markets all over Bangkok, including many shopping malls. I wasn’t sure if the market was still thriving, but it’s as big as ever. The crowded cramped market extends beyond the outer wall of Wat Ratchanada and into the space of an old abandoned temple. The ruins of the temple’s chapel in the middle of the market have been ‘restored’ after a fashion – they’ve been plastered and painted to prevent further deterioration.

I’m tired, but I push on to the Golden Mount. The view from the top of the mount is quite nice, although it’s now getting quite hot out. You can see a long ways for a full 360 degrees.

It’s my last day in Kep. In the morning, we’re off on a motorcycle to the nearby stone hill called Phnom Chosir. The hill holds a small cave with a very old pre-Khmer shrine. To get there, we drive down unpaved country roads, and eventually through a temple. There’s a festival going on and lots of people about. Apparently they don’t get many foreigners visiting here, because as we exit the temple grounds I note that we’ve attracted an entourage of mostly boys trotting alongside the bike. Not far from the temple, we have to park the bike and walk the remaining distance to the hill through rice paddies and farms. This gives me a chance to attract an even bigger collection of groupies.

Getting to the cave requires climbing up some stairs, about three flights in all. Once you reach the top, you notice two things: a great view back over the farms towards the sea, and another flight going down. The cave entrance is more or less on ground level, but the entrance is blocked by a large boulder that you have to climb up and over.

The cave is not much more than a gash in the rock. Just inside the entrance is a small shrine so covered in stalactites that it’s hard to tell where the rock ends and the brick shrine begins. The shrine is a tiny room holding just a very rough lingum on a stone plinth.

From Phnom Chosir, we head back to the main road running from Kep to Kampot, but we don’t go very far. We park the motorcycle again where the mangrove forest meets the highway and get on a fishing boat that will take us to Rabbit Island. This is not one of those tourist boats "like they use for fishing", this is a real fishing boat. A tarp covers a big wad of nets in the middle of the boat.

The boat makes its way through the mangroves and eventually enters the ocean. We make our way along the coast and take about an hour to reach the island. The boat takes me to the small south beach of the island, which looks practically deserted. There are just a couple of shacks used by local fisher-families. A sort of picnic lunch is prepared with the help of a lady in one of the shacks.

After lunch, we walk over to the larger west beach, where most of the day-trippers visit. Here, there are a lot more services, including a few restaurants and even a few shacks you can rent for the night. Facilities are basic, as there is no electricity or, in most cases, indoor plumbing. After lazing about on this beach for a few hours, we head back to the hotel as rain clouds gather on the horizon. Unfortunately, we’ve misjudged things and it starts to rain soon after we leave the beach. It’s an open boat, so I’m soaked by the time we get to the hotel.

See the photo gallery for more pictures of Phnom Chosir and Rabbit Island. For complete travel information about this part of Cambodia, see our updated travel guide to Kampot.

Today I’m off to see the ruins of Bokor, which is one of the main reasons I’ve come here. Unlike the usual pile of rocks that gets my attention, Bokor is not an ancient site. The Bokor hill station was built in the 1920s as a place for the French to escape the heat of the plains. It was more or less abandoned when the Khmer Rouge came to power in the 1970s and now it’s basically a ghost town.

The entire mountain is now a national park, and the only road in is unpaved and very rough, although plans are afoot to improve it. After climbing through the jungle ever upward for about an hour, the car emerges into a hilltop plateau covered with tall grass and flowering shrubs. Soon after, we come to the ruins of the royal palace. At first sight, the small building is hardly palatial, but the long low building is built right on the edge of the bluff. At the rear is a terrace running the length of the house, providing excellent views, weather permitting, of the Cambodian coast and the casino of the distant hill station. Down a path from the royal residence is a much larger building housing the kitchens and a formal dining hall, which also has a good view. There’s also a two-bedroom guest house. Most of the walls here, as at the hill station, are covered with a bright green mossy plant, adding to the post-apocalyptic feel of the place.

Before going to the hill station, we first stop at Popkovil waterfall. Due to the poor state of some bridges, we have to walk the last kilometer or so to the falls. It’s a pleasant walk through a highland marsh bordered by woodlands. I spot a pair of large red squirrels along the way, but they’re gone before I get the camera out.

The falls at first were a rather strange sight. I could hear water falling, but couldn’t see any water running over the stone stream bed leading to the ledge. Only after peering over the edge do you see water coming out of the face of the rock. In the course of flowing to the ledge, the water flows into the limestone and then shoots out of the face. It falls onto another flat ledge, then over another cliff to form a second tier of falls.

 
After hiking back to the car, we drive on to the hill station. The part you catch sight of is the Catholic church, set on a low hill at the edge of the village. We drive past it and up to the ruins of the Bokor Palace Hotel. The grand pile opened in 1926 and must have been quite luxurious for its day, but you have to use your imagination to see that. Doors, windows, light fixtures and even wiring were looted long ago. Like the palace, the hotel sits near the edge of the bluff at the highest point of the station. From the terrace you can get a good view of the village as well as the sea, at least if the weather cooperates. For most of the time I was there, clouds flowed like a sea right up to the edge of the bluff.

There are the ruins of a few other public buildings of the town, such as the post office, jail and another hotel. The whole site is rather eerie, which is probably why it has been used as a movie set.

For more photos of this trip, see the Bokor picture gallery. You can find more information about Bokor and the area in our updated Kampot travel guide.