After the conflict ended the area was resurrected by Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk. The area was something of a royal pet project – the king constructed more buildings, including a casino at the hotel, in 1962.
Despite his best intentions however, these additions did not bring the intended glamour to the mountain. “I went there once: stress and passion reigned,” Marie-Françoise Chatel, a professor who worked in Kampot in the early 1960s, told the Phnom Penh Post in 2014. “Bokor was mysterious and made people a little afraid. Western expats liked to go there to find fresh air, [go] picnicking and play petanque. [But] no-one went off the beaten trails.”
“The hotel lay derelict: a grim reminder of what had happened there, but a intriguing (if slightly morbid) attraction for the few urban explorers”
The casino was closed in 1964 after a spate of gambling-related suicides on Bokor. The dramatic cliffs that can be seen from the hotel were pretty attractions for customers, but also provided an all-too tempting exit route for those caught in the swirl of its roulette table.
“Sometimes women would bring money to play there without telling their husbands, and lose it all,” says Mao Sokha, 66, a retired health manager living in Kampot. “They’d lose the money then jump from the top.”
Mao visited Bokor Station in 1969 when he was a student. “It was wild in the jungle,” he says. “When we drove down we’d meet 20 elephants walking across the road. Once I saw a tiger sleeping – he heard the car then ran at it with his claws out. We closed the window.”
Pythons weren’t so easily avoided. “We saw a big one on the road,” Mao says, “but the driver thought it was a pipe or something so he ran over it. When he hit it the snake’s tail flipped onto the roof of the car, waking my father up. He shouted, ‘What happened?’ and the driver said, ‘Oh, I crashed into a snake’, then went on ahead.”
https://www.vice.com/en_asia/article/8x ... H45ldkC6Pw
And the article it mainly draws off:
https://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-week ... pot-palaceWhile Sokkaom and the Vietnamese were holed up in the church, the Khmer Rouge occupied Bokor Palace. Much of it remained untouched. There were still paintings hanging in the old ballroom. “The chandeliers didn’t work. The marble [which was later stolen] and the tables and chairs, they were still there,” recalled Sokkaom.