Senmonorom
ByThe old jungle logging road from Snoul to Senmonorom, built by the French and bombed by the Americans, was now being widened and improved by the Chinese, financed by the Japanese. Winding through the jungle hills like a long sinuous red brown snake, the hot months produced clouds of hot choking dust. Vehicles jolted up the road trailed by a billowing dust cloud of biblical proportions which immediately enveloped the occasional passing truck in a blinding featureless sea of red dust. This cleared only slowly to allow the jungle to swim back into view. The empty red road appears again cutting through the jungle pointing the way to inexorably to Senmonorom.
Torrential rains turned the dust into a deep cloying porridge which gripped vehicles and men alike and brought travel to a treacherous, sliding, skidding impossibility. For weeks the road was impassable and the inhabitants of Senmonorom relied on their own resources.
Now broader, less undulating and infinitely smoother the old jungle road has become a highway. Instead of slithering through the jungle along the natural contours, watched by shy deer, it slashes through the undergrowth vaulting mountain streams, bridging creeks and spanning crevices. They gave it a number – 76.
Senmonorom though is no idyllic sluggish backwater. It has been at the forefront of some of the darkest episodes of modern world history. The long dirt airstrip was built by the French early last century and maintained right up to the mid 1950s. It was then that the French were defeated by the Vietnamese in Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Close to the border with Vietnam the jungle paths here pulsated with troops and supplies trudging from the north to supply the Vietcong guerrillas in South Vietnam in the 1960s. Even today the lines of bomb craters from American B52 air strikes still march across the landscape. The unexploded ordnance from these days seriously slowed down the current re-development of the road.
Following Maoist ideology the Pol Pot regime in the 1970s identified the subsistence agricultural lifestyle of the indigenous peoples of this area as a viable social model. So people from here were dragooned into the Khmer Rouge and participated in the genocide which emptied the towns and cities and killed two million doctors, managers, teachers, lawyers and anyone else with a vestige of education.
Today this beautiful region totters on the edge of economic sustainability and the new road will certainly open up the area to trade with the rest of Cambodia and the nearby markets of Vietnam. Tourists are already finding their way into this remote region. Apart from spectacular jungle waterfalls visitors enjoy extreme elephant treks down impossibly steep jungle trails on the backs of the logging elephants. The growth in prosperity is already clearly visible with more businesses, shops, hotels and restaurants springing up every day.
