For hundreds of years the Khmers believed that the soil and the trees and the stones around them were imbued with the spirits of their ancestors. They called this Nak Ta. The spirits or ghosts who lived in or near inhabited places were friendly; those that live in the deep forest were not. Cambodia’s landmines are like a vivid, ugly manifestation of Nak Ta. The inhabited areas are clear and safe; the remote rural areas still claim one victim every day.
I don’t believe in ghosts. But I know that sometimes our memories of the dead can overwhelm us. In that sense Cambodia is filled with ghosts. Even the laid-back beach resort of Sihanoukville.
In 1964 the newest and best hotel in town was the Independence, a classic piece of 60s modernism on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with orange furniture, a circular dining-room, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool. But in Year Zero the Khmer Rouge took over the hotel as a base. They drained the pool, covered it with a wooden grille, and used it as a prison.
Now that Sihanoukville is becoming a major tourist destination once again, a Thai consortium is renovating the Independence Hotel, preserving many of the original architectural features, including the pool. I wish them luck. But the people we met in Sihanoukville say that they would never stay there. I am not sure that I would either.
More poetically, the ghost of French colonialism dwells on Bokor Hill. This was a retreat for the French overlords, 3,300 feet above the surrounding plain, near the southernmost tip of Cambodia. At this height the temperature was tolerable for the lily-white Europeans. The road to the top was built by indentured labor over eighty years ago, has not been maintained since the 1950s, and was torn apart by tanks when the Khmer Rouge took over the station and the Vietnamese came to get them. We rode up in the back of a pick-up truck. It’s only 25 miles, but the road is so scarred that it takes three hours.
The main building is a glorious folly, all terraces and stairwells and ballrooms and corridors to nowhere. Covered in a mysterious blood-red moss, shrouded in mist, it lacks only an enormous coal-black hound. Elsewhere in the ruins of the retreat, scattered over a few dozen acres, are a casino, a viewing platform, and a Catholic church.
There is talk of renovating Bokor Hill too. I hope that it remains a monument to the foolishness of dead white European colonists, who had to climb a mountain to escape the heat.