Cardamoms Tree

The area remains largely inaccessible. The central range— which lies between two existing wildlife sanctuaries—can only be reached by water, then by logging road, then by a path hacked into the jungle. Still, more people arrive each day.

With the peace of recent years, logging companies are creeping up the mountain valleys, felling trees, clearing land and hunting. Poachers are taking animals for the wildlife 

Steven Swan examines his bloodied shirt after removing a leech from his chest.

The small fiberglass boat propelled by a roaring outboard motor skips across the waves as we pull away from Koh Kong and head into the rising sun. Soon there is nothing but mangrove forests and lone fishermen. In the distance, blue mist hands over the tree-carpeted mountain.

The boat angles toward a small village on the far side of the channel and slows near two wooden fishing boats, modified into gunboats. Three heavy machine guns are mounted on each deck and a soldier stands at the bow. Sam says with a wry smile, “Maybe boom, boom, boom.” The soldier motions us on with a nod.

The road into the mountains begins at the waterfront headquarters of GAT, the Malaysian company that has the logging concession to this stretch of forest. We pile into a pickup-truck taxi, already loaded with chickens, gas tanks and a half dozen people, and start for the jungle.

The village of Thmar Baing, the only real settlement in Thmar Baing district, lies 50 km from the logging headquarters. Until the village was established two years ago, the district capital was in Botum Sakor district, so empty was Thmar Baing. Today the village is a mix of families who have come to eke a living from the forest and the soldiers hired by GAT to guard its trees and equipment. With an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, one of the soldiers accompanies us to the expedition base camp.

The FFI team has carved a small camp out of the jungle, 90 km from the sea. From here the researchers fan out into the mountains and rivers, documenting wildlife. Without the logging road, entering the jungle would have been significantly harder. And along with the access it provides, the road offers the researchers a unique cutaway view of the jungle’s vegetation and trees, like looking into a terrarium. But the road, and others like it, is also the biggest problem, says Steven Swan, a researcher from England who focuses on Indochina’s wildlife.

At the team’s first research site in the Cardamoms, in Mount Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary near the Thai border, former refugees are flooding in with the help of the UN, staking out their homestead, nailing signs to trees marking their plot of land. The central mountains seem headed in the same direction. “I imagine most of [this] forest will be gone in a few years,” Swan says.

THE FIRST RECORDS of expeditions in the Cardamom mountains date to the late 19th century, with officials from the French protectorate venturing into the area to check up on Cardamom spice production and spread the government’s influence and control.

In 1919, a man named Richomme detailed his experience riding deep into the mountains on horseback, with elephants carrying the luggage. “Traveling by cart would be, if not impossible, at least very difficult,” he wrote in his report of the trip, preserved at the National Archives. “This forest has the reputation of being impenetrable and is hardly known to the locals. Only two or three Cambodians have climbed it in the past. They allege one can go through only by following the steps of wild elephants.”

Crossing through the village of Chres, Richomme wrote: “One wonders what made them decide to come live in such a lost land. Actually one could even ask the same questions of the villages of Chomnang Chrum and Thmar Baing.”

At the time, Thmar Baing had two families. The few others had left a year earlier with the outbreak of a flu epidemic. Today, Thmar Baing, the district’s only populous village, has about 100 people.

Though the forests were widely used during the French protectorate by villagers who hunted animals for food and collected trees that were sold to Malaysian and Chinese businessmen, the French officials write of a land spared the heavy hand of humans.

“The land is very rich. Dense forests, superb orchids and trees not seen yet,” a Pursat provincial official wrote of his 1927 journey to the Cardamoms. “Night comes over delicious... scenery: pure air, soft light, deep woods with superb pines surrounding beautiful pastures with fat black earth through which goes a lovely river of clean and cold water.”

The fauna, he wrote, “are rich and varied, including among others, very interesting species that are starting to be scarce.” He lists rhinoceros, black panther, gaur, wild cattle, tiger and elephant as common sights in the area.

The last recorded expedition to the mountains was by a French ornithologist in the 1940s. Soon after, the area would be locked to the outside world.

FIGHTING BETWEEN THE Khmer Rouge and government forces began in the area in the late 1960s, with the assassinations of a half dozen district officials. As the country fell into all-out warfare, the mountains became a stronghold for Khmer Rouge fighters. They would return here after the regime’s fall in 1979 and live Spartan lives in the jungle for the next 20 years.

Logging companies moved into the area in the 1990s and small bands of Khmer Rouge fighters found a new source of funding, occasionally kidnapping logging company employees and holding them for ransom. In April 1998, two Malaysian businessmen and two RCAF soldiers were ambushed and killed in the GAT concession along the road to the expedition base camp.

These security concerns kept most people out of the area. But peace has had its dividends, for loggers, poachers, refugees and researchers—the forests have once again been opened. And in most cases, there is little government control.

Until the Khmer Rouge came to power, there was an established system of wildlife sanctuaries in Cambodia, started by the French, totaling about 2 million hectares. The central Cardamoms was one of the sanctuaries, comprising 280,000 hectares with five rangers. In 1993, the system was reestablished by decree of King Norodom Sihanouk, using boundaries drawn by David Ashwell, a botanist working as a consultant for the government. “We were trying to aim for comprehensiveness in terms of habitat coverage,” Ashwell says. While sanctuaries were created in the eastern and western Cardamoms, the middle area was not included.

Today there are 23 protected areas across the country. They are commonly referred to as “paper parks,” implying they are special areas in name only and, in most cases, this is true. Few of the countries national parks and wildlife sanctuaries are actively patrolled, and activities inside the boundaries are loosely monitored.

Conservationists agree the government’s environment and wildlife officials are in a tough position: they have neither the resources or training to adequately protect these regions. Several international groups are working to equip the government to protect its natural resources, but progress is slow, often hindered by government officials involved in illegal logging and wildlife trade.

As logging and poaching continues in Cambodia’s forest, there is limited knowledge of what may be disappearing. There have been few plant and wildlife surveys in Cambodia and almost all of these have been in the eastern part of the country, where security has been better.

In 1998, the Wildlife Protection Office and Cat Action Treasury devised a new plan for documenting Cambodia’s wildlife, traveling to 13 provinces and interviewing 150 hunters about what they see in the forest. Reports of the richest wildlife populations came from the 31 hunters living in Koh Kong and Pursat provinces.

Fauna and Flora International followed up the interviews with a short expedition into the Cardamoms last year that showed a land of dense jungles sheltering an abundance of mammals, birds and reptiles. The Department of Forestry and Wildlife then proposed that the 1,200-meter-high plateau between the Mount Samkos and Mount Aural wildlife sanctuaries be declared a conservation forest. While preserving the land in this area, it would also create a corridor between the two sanctuaries, giving animals a wide protected path.

But to have the area protected, there needs to be strong scientific justification that the central mountains are unique and worthy of government intervention. The expedition—financed largely through the British embassy in Phnom Penh and Conservation International—has brought together researchers from around the globe who specialize in everything from birds and bats to frogs and crocodiles. Most of them have donated their time to explore the Cardamoms, one of the most untouched areas of Southeast Asia. They spent a month in the Mount Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary and are now finishing a month of surveying in the central Cardamoms.

“On a global scale, this is a top priority,” say Frank Momberg, Indochina director for Fauna and Flora International. “It’s a historical window of opportunity.”

THE PLANT TEAM assembles after a breakfast of rice with onions and mushrooms and checks their maps. The destination for the day is the mountain that rises across the river. Before leaving camp, they tuck their pants into their socks, which they coat with a toxic white chemical, meant to keep the land leeches off their skin.

They head south down the red road to the logging camp then start up the mountain on a narrow road that slices through the jungle, the path used by the giant yellow bulldozers to pull felled trees from the jungle. After a kilometer, they turn right and plunge into the thickness. The lead man wields a machete, slicing down branches and vines, clearing a slit to pass through.

The team—two people from the Ministry of Environment and two local guides—moves with the precision and efficiency of a military patrol, gliding smoothly over rocks and fallen trees, speaking little. They move with speed, as well. Soon I am wishing they would find a plant to stop and examine so I can catch my breath, but they continue up the mountain slope, which becomes steeper with each step. At times, the path is nearly vertical. Without branches and tree roots to grasp, the slope would be too steep to scale.

When they have climbed high enough—750 meters for the day’s survey site—they unroll measuring tape and divide the area into four blocks, 50 meters by 50 meters. They take notes on the soil type, predominant vegetation, canopy, and grade of the slope as well as disturbances—logging, fire, trails and animal tracks. They walk the perimeter of the survey area, measuring the circumference of each tree and the distance to the next tree. The information will give them a picture of what grows in the Cardamoms and which animals can survive here.

The land leeches, at least, clearly have no problem surviving in the jungle. As we walk, I feel a pinch in my boot, just above my ankle and look down to see my sock stained red. My right foot, when I pull off my boot, is covered in blood—a land leach has made it through the toxic barrier on my socks and latched on to me. I watch the leech—swollen to four times its normal size with my blood—fall to the ground.

“The forest tax,” Meng Monyrak, head of the plant team, tells me. “You come to the forest and you pay in blood.”

Sometimes a nuisance, the leeches are an indicator of forest health. They need blood to survive, which means they need wildlife. In a forest with no land leeches, there is no wildlife.

FINDING WILDLIFE IS tricky, a mix of training and luck. Barney Long, a large mammal specialist, was walking on a path at night in the first survey area when the beam of his flashlight caught a tiger’s eyes staring back at him. In the central mountains, a civit cat nearly ran into him as he and Swan walked on the logging road at night.

But, for the most part, coming across signs of wildlife is much harder work. The researchers spend hours in the field each day, hiking up and down mountain slopes, searching for paw prints, claw marks on trees, piles of scat or—much more rarely—sightings of the animals themselves.

They divide their time between different elevations, looking for animals that prefer to live at certain altitudes. “They make good indicators. Generalists that can live anywhere—like human beings—make bad indicators,” Swan says. Finding an animal unique to the Cardamoms, or a certain area of the mountains, would be a key element of getting the area protected.

The expedition is not trying to document the exact populations of animals in the Cardamoms, but merely the presence or absence of various species. “This is a quick and dirty survey,” Swan says. “Your methods don’t always have to be scientifically rigorous. Once you’ve found tiger, you don’t have to find it again, you go on. It’s a mad scramble to get as much information as you can in that short period.”

The team of foreign researchers has also been training the Cambodian staff from the Ministry of Environment and the Wildlife Protection Office so they can do future wildlife surveys on their own. They have been trained on animal trapping, recording field data and operating the Global Positioning Satellite system, which gives the user’s location within about 100 meters. GPS systems, which cost $350 a piece, are the sort of high-tech and expensive tools donor groups can provide.

“If we don’t have GPS, it’s very difficult to find where we are on the map,” says Meng Monyrak, deputy chief of the Protected Areas Office in the Ministry of Environment.

But the guide, says Barney Long, is the primary navigation tool. “If the guide doesn’t know where you are going, you’re usually in trouble,” he says. For the expedition, FFI hired several local hunters from Thmar Baing, men who go into the jungle for days or weeks at a time, hunting deer, boar and tiger. “The best guides are definitely Khmer Rouge,” Long says. “They know the forest, they’ve lived in the forest, and they hunt to survive.”

EVEN WITH THE guides’ expertise, the expedition’s progress is slow. Each day, they tick off a few bird species, maybe a mammal or a frog or two. They have found signs of tiger and elephant, but have yet to locate a species that would set the Cardamoms apart.

This changes with a satellite phone call to Jennifer Daltry, the expedition leader who has been off searching for reptiles in the mountain rivers. She has found Siamese crocodiles, a critically endangered species known to have no other significant populations in the world.

“It’s great news,” Swan says. “It’s better than finding tiger or elephant—much better.”

This sort of find, the team reasons, may be enough incentive for the government to protect the central mountains, closing the logging concessions. Though any action by the government would be far in the future—if ever—the news leaves the team hopeful.

The next day’s phone call to Phnom Penh mutes the good spirits.

“There’s news,” Swan tells Kry Masphal, sitting down near his hammock. “You know Mony, who was working at the first camp?”

Sure, Kry Masphal says. They are colleagues at the Wildlife Protection office.

“He’s dead from malaria,” Swan says.

Kry Masphal squints as though he does not understand Swan. “Dead?”

Meas Chanda Mony was scheduled to come to this base camp in a few days. He left Veal Veng at 3 pm March 8 making it to Pursat at 4 the next morning. He showed no signs of malaria, but complained of exhaustion from the long trip.

By the next day, back at his home in Kompong Chhnang, he was sick enough to go to a doctor. The Cambodian physician diagnosed him with five-star malaria—the highest rating —and gave him a shot of quinine. The treatment can take up to one week to take effect. The team had been using articinate, which usually knocks out malaria in a couple days.

On March 11, Meas Chanda Mony was watching television at his sister’s house when his brain hemorrhaged. Weiler relayed the news to base camp that night.

By that point, more than a third of the expedition had contracted malaria, along with several locals hired as guides and porters. In the end, at least 13 of 20 team members would become sick.

“It’s an occupational hazard,” says Swan, who has had malaria twice on this expedition.

THOUGH GIVEN THE option of returning to Phnom Penh after Meas Chanda Mony’s death, the team members from Ministry of Environment and the WPO stay on at the base camp. The most important work is about to begin. The team will soon move its camp to the highlands of the central mountains and what they find there will be crucial to whether or not the area earns protection. The trip to the highlands will be strenuous, with a two day walk through thick, steep jungle.

The logging road does not yet extend that far north, but it is scheduled to go through the mountains and connect, eventually, with Pursat. Conservationists would be thrilled if the road building stopped, if it had never started. But for the country to develop, they say, roads may be inevitable.

“We all have to accept that remote provinces need to be connected to the national infrastructure,” says Ashwell, who helped create today’s protected areas system. “We can live with that, provided that the land is managed properly.”

Part of the problem lies in the lack of strong laws to protect Cambodia’s natural resources. Draft laws on wildlife, protected areas and forestry have been submitted, but have yet to be adopted. They would give government agencies clearer guidelines for implementing policy and enforcing law.

There is also a problem in closing off forested areas without providing an alternative way for locals and the government to make money. “Because of the situation in Cambodia, we can’t say ‘Stop the logging, make this a national park,’ “ Long says. “Any country with money would just protect it, but they can’t here. It’s not economically possible.”

Stopping people from hunting endangered species in the mountains requires an altering of views on the forest. Conservation has a low priority for locals; survival has the highest. There is talk of hiring local hunters to protect the area and educate their neighbors about the importance of conservation. But funds for salaries would be limited, while killing one tiger can net a hunter more than $2,000. In addition to the hunters, there are hundreds of people who scour the forests for yellow vine, which is ground down and shipped to Vietnam as a traditional medicine.

“You worry that we’re going to document it then it’s going to be gone,” says Colin Poole, Cambodia’s country program coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society. He acknowledges that saving the forest and the wildlife will be difficult, even if the central mountains are declared a conservation forest. “It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it? But then you have a corridor between two areas that aren’t protected,” he says. “There’s no point in drawing another line on a map.”

While there is little enforcement in protected areas, they have been beneficial, says Ashwell. “Otherwise they’d all be [logging] concessions, every bit of evergreen forest.

“The parks will never work until the international community invests in them. That’s the primary problem,” he says. “However, whenever a donor has put money in, progress has been made. It’s really up to the international community to help bring this into being.”

Several groups, including FFI and the World Wide Fund for Nature, have been training staff at the Ministry of Environment and the Wildlife Protection Office and outfitting them with equipment to patrol national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.

In recent months, the government’s leaders have been giving more support to conservation, with Prime Minister Hun Sen calling for a crackdown on poaching. But so far, forces exploiting forest resources are moving faster than government efforts to conserve them.

The best hope for the Cardamoms, conservationists and government officials say, may be having the area—nearly 1 million hectares including the Mount Samkos and Mount Aural wildlife sanctuaries—declared a World Heritage Site. This would open a source of funding as well as provide international recognition.

The decision is made by the World Heritage Committee, an arm of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, after a country petitions for assistance. For natural areas, protection can be given to sites of “outstanding universal value from the point of view of science, conservation, or natural beauty.”

“Only with this designation,” says Meng Monyrak, of the Ministry of Environment, “will there be enough funding.”

AS THE TEAM prepares for the last leg of the expedition, into the high country of the central Cardamoms, I sit at the edge of the red road, waiting for the soldiers. They greet me with their customary courtesy and smiles. I stand in the truck bed, behind the cab, holding on to the metal frame as we race down the road to Thmar Baing then to the sea, the warming morning air buffeting my face.

The mountains rise up like a wave. To the left the road falls away and the river, far below, drives toward the ocean, swirling in pools and tumbling over rocks. As the mist clears from the mountainsides and birds call out, I wonder what this remote land will look like in tomorrow’s Cambodia.

The few who have lived in the Cardamoms for many years see their world changing with each passing day. The roads bring more people and more people mean fewer animals. For Heng Chandara, who has hunted for years in these mountains, the changes signal the ending of a way of life.

“A son should follow his father and walk in the forest,” he said the previous night, as the hunters smoked tobacco and traded stories. But for his son, Heng Chandara said, the Cardamom mountains may have little to offer.