Kirirom National Park

I had an opportunity to go to Preah Suramarith Kossmak National Park last Sunday with some other westerners and some Cambodians. Preah Sumarith, more commonly known as Kirirom National Park, is about 65 miles (110 kilometers) outside of Phnom Penh. It's a mountain resort on a hill that's about half a mile high.

Kirirom is both a resort and a national park. It's an idyllic place--King Sihanouk had a palace built there in the 1960s. Its altitude makes it cooler than the rest of the country--cold enough that there are pine trees instead of tropical plants. "Kirirom" means "Mountain of Joy", apparently Sihanouk gave it that name.

The Cambodians were organizing the trip, and told us to meet at their office at 7am. I arrived at 7; those of you familiar with Cambodia will not be surprised to hear that the only people there were westerners. The first of the locals arrived at 7:20 or so, and we weren't on the road until 7:40. Punctuality is a western concept.

Our crew for the trip was me, another American, two Dutch girls, three Cambodian guys, their wives, and their two daughters. Two of the wives were pregnant, one very pregnant (7 months in). Something that surprised me was that there was absolutely no special treatment for the pregnant women--they got crammed into the car with the rest of us (eight in one car), did just as much work preparing lunch as everyone else, etc.

So we hit the road at 7:40. As is apparently the Cambodian custom, we stopped for breakfast about 15 minutes later, just outside town. We foolish westerners had already eaten, figuring that we would make the 65 mile drive in one leg. Turned out no. Because of road conditions, 65 miles takes about two hours if you drive non-stop, but no one here drives non-stop.

I made the mistake of asking the waitress if they had coconuts. They didn't, but one of the Cambodians overheard me. We got back on the road, but five minutes later we stopped--to buy a dozen coconuts. I was given one to drink in the car. Note to people who like coconuts and might ride in automobiles: don't combined those things. Coconuts spill.

Anyway, we eventually arrived at the base of the mountain. Kirirom Park costs 3500 riel (60 cents) for Cambodians, but 20000 riel (five dollars) for foreigners. Our hosts pointed out that we lived and worked here and that they were paying for us, but to no avail--and of course they insisted on paying for our admission (and everything else) anyway.

The road became a lot rougher once we were on the mountain. There were a lot of potholes, some of them so big that we had to almost stop and crawl through them. There were a lot of wooden bridges, but they weren't flush with the roads, so getting on and off of them was unpleasant. The road is a bit steep, but nothing our host's Toyota couldn't handle.

We made our third stop near the top of the mountain, for food. There's a large clearing filled with food vendors who sell all sorts of grilled foods and fruit. We bought a few snacks to eat right away, including a delicious rice and banana and coconut mix, grilled in a banana leaf. Our hosts bought a bunch of food for lunch, threw it in the back of one of the cars, and we climbed on the back of the pickup truck and drove on to our picnic spot.

We arrived at the lakeside at 11:45am, almost five hours after our 65 mile trip was supposed to begin. Ahh, the Cambodian way of traveling.

Kirirom is a popular site for Cambodians from Phnom Penh to picnic by the lakeside. The central lake is surrounded by wooden huts with palm frond roofs, and most of them were occupied. Now that I think back, I think we were the only westerners, but I'm not sure about that. We claimed a hut by the lake, the men disappeared, and the women set up lunch. Conveniently, the men reappeared just as the women finished getting everything ready.

Lunch was delicious. We had roast chicken (which has a lot more flavor here than in the U.S., I don't know why), a whole fish, a not whole fish, some sort of dried meat that one guy said was lobster, but then explained that me meant "the deer-like thing with the horns", we think antelope. There were plenty of coconuts to drink, of course.

While we were eating, a few children came by collecting cans. We gave them our empties and made the mistake of giving one of them a piece of chicken--within minutes, the rest surrounded our hut, hands out.

This part of the park was crowded. A lot of people come up here to picnic--mostly families with children, but also groups of teenage boys playing cards. A lot of people were swimming, the boys in their clothing, the children in bathing suits or naked. The huts were fairly close together, maybe three feet betweeen them. I read somewhere that the huts were too close for Americans to be comfortable, but Asians have less of a need for personal space. As far as I can tell, that's total crap--we New Yorkers don't mind when someone's picnicking three feet away, otherwise we couldn't enjoy Central Park.

I later found out that the park covers about 80,000 acres--that's a lot of park. I guess it's just like national parks in the United States--99% of people never go more than a few hundred feet from the road.

The signs claim there are waterfalls, but we didn't see any--only the lake outlet running over the rocks. I'm told that in the rainy season, it's much more impressive.

After lunch, I went for a walk around the lake. There's what's advertised as a "nature walk", ten minutes long. I made a few wrong turns and ended up climbing a fairly steep cliff and found myself in the midst of a field pretty far away from the lake. Concerned about snakes and land mines (this part of the country was controlled by the Khmer Rouge until the early 1990s), I walked back to the crowded area, and this time I went around with one of the Cambodian guys, who knew the trail. The jungle walk was fun, though not very long--there was a bamboo garden, a few wussy waterfalls, and some beautiful views of the lake.

We stuck around for an hour or so after lake, headed back to Phnom Penh around 3pm. Of course, we stopped about 15 minutes in to buy fruit. I don't exactly understand why it takes 45 minutes to buy fruit at a roadside stand, but it does.

Maybe an hour later, we stopped again, and the guy driving said he wanted to buy meat. We went to a small house with a stall outside, and around back the owner had several types of meat hanging from hooks. He bought some wild boar and some antelope. In the car, he explained that he likes to buy meat from soldiers because they hunt wild animals, and bushmeat tastes better. Sure, he admitted, the antelope are an endangered species and hunting is illegal, but it's much tastier. We didn't exactly know what to say to that (and were suspicious of what we ate at lunch).

In Phnom Penh, stopped at a traffic light, the car behind us bumped us. The driver got out and apologized, he seemed drunk.

We got in at 6:45, almost four hours after we left. The mountain was beautiful, and it was interesting to see what the locals do with their leisure time. Admittedly, eight hours in transit for three hours at a park isn't exactly my idea of a fun day, but our hosts were incredibly nice people, very generous, the food was good, and it was nice to get up into the mountains for a bit. The walk through the forest was probably the closest I'll ever come to hiking through Cambodian jungle, and we got to see another side of the country. Also, clean mountain air was a nice break from the grey muck we breathe here in Phnom Penh. Overall, a good day, but a long one.