Bokor hillstation is a highlight of my entire trip. It was founded by the French over 90 years ago as an escape from the high temperatures of Cambodian summer. It’s other attractions were a luxurious casino cum hotel and a spaceship with long legs. The view from the casino is stunning: from a 1000 meter high mountain decorated with a beautiful rainforest you can clearly see the sea which is just a couple of kilometers away. The hotel terrace on the cliff has two shocking tales. Firstly it was used to jump of by gamblers that had lost everything in the casino, secondly the Khmer Rouge killed people by throwing them off from the same location.

As you can see in the the photoshoot, Bokor Hillstatation now consists of abandoned buildings. Inside them literally everything is broken. Successive wars (Japanese, Kmehr rouge, Vietnamese) took care of that. The buildings are currently covered in a red-orange moss that give a particularly scary feel.

Please have a look at the pictures i took:
http://picasaweb.google.com/gcjbos/BokorHillStation

I arrived with a big group (30 people), but fortunately I was only one of three that had booked the two day trip (which included an overnight stay with the rangers in the national park).

As I carefully walked on the paths (the area had been cleared of landmines 3 times) and explored the buildings alone, I suddenly came to the shock realization that I was walking through a relatively recent (15-25 years) warzone. Now is the entire world probably a former warzone, but I had never experienced it this real and this recent. When I continued my way to witness the most beautiful cloudy sunset ever (next to a ransacked church) the images in my mind of a beautiful casino were replaced by the atrocities of war.

Now the whole area including the national park is leased to an international consortium ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokor_Hill_Station ) for 99 years. It is expected that visitors won’t be allowed in anymore from the end of this year onwards (safety during construction work). The beautiful destroyed casino might wiped of the earth for good.