The developer behind a US$6 million ecotourism project at Bou Sra waterfall in Mondulkiri province has pulled the plug on the scheme. Sar Lar Investment Co was set to develop the Bou Sra Waterfall Resort, a complex of 40 hotels, restaurants, and shops surrounding the well-known attraction. It was hoped the development would sell souvenirs produced by Mondulkiri’s ethnic minorities, benefiting them economically.

The company owns a 99-year lease on the Mondulkiri site and has already spent $2 million clearing forest and constructing a road. The project was due to be complete in 2013. “We have already completed a garden and a set of stairs down to the Bou Sra waterfall from the top,” a representative said.

The Mondulkiri Tourism Department confirmed Sunday that it is temporarily taking care of the site.
“We expected that when this ecotourism project was finished it would meet tourist demand for accommodation and would be of the great benefit to the indigenous people in the area. But now everything will not come true because the project has stopped,” Representatives from the tourism body say they hope the resort will be developed, in time, by another investor.

For tours of Mondolkiri contact Asia Adventures at: info@asia-adventures.com

Edited from the Phnom Penh Post (26-4-10)

It rattles along at 20 miles an hour, swaying back and forth on uneven rails, the engine so loud it makes your teeth hurt. Then, rather unceremoniously, it runs out of gas and dies. You find yourself stranded in the middle of Cambodia on a handmade “norry” train, feeling a bit exposed on a 25-square-foot platform made of bamboo and scrap metal attached to wheels salvaged from old tanks.

Picture one of those hand-pump rail cars depicted in old Westerns, and you’re close. It’s powered (when it has gas) by a converted outboard engine. The brakes (when it has gas and you need brakes) are a wooden board pushed against the wheels. No seats. All this bamboo and scrap metal give it a makeshift appearance, and appearances do not deceive. Pretty soon, driver Path Chanthorn starts pushing the disabled norry with hands that are missing a few fingers from a run-in with a water buffalo — “a strong cow,” he mutters. Another norry approaches from the opposite direction, every inch of its platform covered by a dozen people headed for a festival. With a single track to ride on, etiquette dictates that the norry with the lighter load be taken apart so the other can pass. So Chanthorn and his assistant quickly dismantle their vehicle and let the other one by, then put theirs back together again, all within minutes - and you are on your way.

Now a government plan to upgrade the country’s rail system may end up forever stranding the norry, an ingenious response to the decades of war, destruction and dire poverty that have afflicted Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1970s, as the country descended into civil war and mass murder, 2 million people perished. And in leader Pol Pot’s quest to reach “Year Zero,” Cambodia also saw most of its roads destroyed, its trucks blown up, its locomotives charred. By the early 1980s, as Cambodia started to emerge from the nightmare, people remembered the small vehicles used by rail workers in the 1960s to repair the tracks and started building their own. The norry, a name some say is derived from a mispronunciation of “lorry,” was born.

The unique mode of transportation saw its heyday in the 1980s when other vehicles were scarce. “There were bombs and mines everywhere, roads were destroyed and rail cars a shambles,” says Kot Sareurn, 50, a union leader for 23 norry drivers in Battambang, a picturesque provincial capital along the tranquil Sangker River. “Norries helped a lot of people survive, get to hospitals, get food.”
Initially operators “rowed” the norries with poles, gondola-style, carrying loads of up to 40 people, eight cows or three tons of rice. After a few years, small gasoline engines were added.

Drivers said that at the peak, thousands of norries operated throughout Cambodia, charging villagers only a few cents for a ride but still making a decent living with so many people and possessions jammed aboard. These days, the few hundred remaining norries are relegated to short distances in a few provinces, more an oddity for tourists than the lifeblood they once represented, as trucks, public buses and motorbikes fill the gap. They’re still privately owned, but nowadays companies sometimes own several of them, splitting the profits with drivers.

They’ve clung to life thanks to the tourists and Cambodia’s catatonic rail system. The last train anyone saw around Battambang’s Odombang station lumbered through more than a year ago. The norry drivers have since taken over the tiny station, sleeping in hammocks on the platform, littering its dirt floor with their cigarette wrappers. But there’s movement down the line. The government plans to revamp the nation’s two modest state-owned rail lines — a 230-mile stretch from Phnom Penh to the border with Thailand completed by the French in 1942, and a 150-mile stretch from the capital to the southwestern Sihanoukville port finished with help from China and Germany in 1969. Government officials envision turning the system over to private operators by early 2012.

This would almost certainly see the go-cart-like norries muscled aside by “real” trains.

Edited from The Los Angeles Times (27-4-10)

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Yeak Loam Lake in Rattanakiri province is a place of eerie beauty: Nestled in the circular crater of an extinct volcano, the water is crystal-clear and surrounded by lush, semi-deciduous forestland. Around the lake are five villages – Lapoe, Lon, Sil, Chree and Phnom – that are home to the Tampuen, a minority group who hold animistic beliefs and who consider the lake and forests to be inhabited by powerful spirits.

The area’s beauty has proven to be a blessing as well as a curse. In 2007, members of the Tampuen community formed the Yeak Loam Arts Group with the aim of preserving the region’s traditional music, dance and culture in the face of encroachments on indigenous lifestyles from outsiders seeking to buy up and develop land around the lake. Group spokesperson Van Cae explained that the survival of Tampuen culture was dependent on the health of the lake and the forests that surround it. “The forest is very important to us. If there is no forest, life will be very difficult for the villagers,” he said. “If they take the land and the lake, it will mean the loss of our culture, the loss of everything. That’s why we want people to understand our culture.”

This week, 25 members of the Yeak Loam Arts Group have brought an array of metal gongs, bamboo flutes and other instruments to Phnom Penh to spread the word by making studio recordings of their music and performing live at various venues. Meas Hurn, the group’s team leader, said he hoped that making a studio recording of their music and releasing it on CD would help teach people about Tampuen culture and raise awareness about the dangers posed by unscrupulous development. “We came to record our songs because we are in danger of losing our land,” he said. “So we want to promote our culture because we hope it will help raise support for us to prevent loss of the land and forest.”

The Yeak Loam Arts Group CD is expected to be released within two months and will include a booklet with information about the group, their songs and their instruments.

To visit Ratanakiri and Yeak Loam Lake contact: info@asia-adventures.com

Edited from Phnom Penh Post 2-4-10

Droughts and flooding may have been decisive factors in the mysterious collapse of the ancient Khmer capital of Angkor, according to a new study released this week. The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, researchers Brendan Buckley, Daniel Penny and their collaborators argue that climate variation strained the city’s complex and fragile infrastructure beyond repair, leaving it unable to support its population.

The researchers based their argument on an analysis of growth rings from cypress trees discovered in Vietnam that were almost 1,000 years old. By looking at the varying widths of the growth rings, Buckley and his colleagues determined that Angkor was subject to two major droughts – one in the mid 1300s, and another in the early 1400s – that coincided with the period in which the Khmer imperial capital is believed to have begun an accelerated decline. These droughts, which likely had a severe impact on Angkor’s agricultural productivity, were followed closely by unusually intense monsoon seasons that led to floods and damage to the system of canals and baray upon which residents depended for water management.

“What our study demonstrates … is that decades of weakened summer monsoon rainfall, punctuated by abrupt and extreme wet episodes that likely brought severe flooding that damaged flood-control infrastructure, must now be considered an additional, important, and significant stressor occurring during a period of decline,” the researchers wrote.

The new study, lends depth and context to the emerging understanding among archaeologists that Angkor’s demise was more complicated than traditional theories have suggested. In the past, scholars have ascribed the decline to conflict with the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya and the flight of the empire’s elite to what is now Phnom Penh.

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Edited from Phnom Penh Post 31-3-10