Banlung

Ratanakiri's uplands lay outside the reach of the Khmer kings and their successors for most of their history. The plateau was the country of the Tampuan, Jarai, Kreung, Brao and Kavet, who farmed rotating hill fields and traded forest products, resin, wax and later rubber down the rivers to the Mekong. The province's name, from the Khmer words for gem and mountain, points to the stones dug in its hills. Under the French, large rubber plantations were laid out around Labansiek, the settlement that became Banlung, with indigenous workers used for the building and the harvesting.

Banlung itself is a modern town. Norodom Sihanouk's development and Khmerization campaign in the 1950s and 1960s drove roads, plantations and lowland settlers into the north-east and moved some highland families to the lowlands to be schooled in Khmer. War followed: the Ho Chi Minh Trail and North Vietnamese base areas ran through the forests to the east, American bombing followed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the Khmer Rouge built some of its earliest strongholds in these hills, recruiting among highland communities. The provincial capital moved from Veun Sai to Banlung in 1979, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, to make trade with Vietnam easier; before Veun Sai it had been at Lumphat.

After 1979 the province remained isolated, reached by a road that took days in the wet season. The paving of National Highway 78 in the 2000s ended that, and with it came rubber, cassava and cashew plantations, migration from the lowlands, logging and gem digging, and a rapid transformation of the landscape. Banlung grew into a small market and administrative town, and from the 1990s a modest flow of travellers arrived for the lake, the waterfalls and the forest.

The province is one of the most culturally distinct in Cambodia. Indigenous peoples make up a large share of its population, each with their own language, and many communities keep animist beliefs centred on spirits of the forest, the water and the ancestors, alongside Buddhism and, in some villages, Christianity. Sacred groves, spirit forests and elaborately carved wooden grave houses, decorated with figures and personal possessions of the dead, remain part of village life and are private places rather than sights.

Rice wine drunk through long bamboo straws from a shared jar accompanies weddings, funerals, harvests and the welcoming of guests, and gongs and buffalo sacrifice have traditionally marked the largest ceremonies. Weaving, basketry and back-strap looms produce cloth still worn on ceremonial occasions. The Tampuan communities around Yeak Laom manage the crater lake, which is regarded as sacred, and run it as a community site.

Banlung's own life is more mixed: lowland Khmer officials, traders and plantation staff, Chinese and Vietnamese shopkeepers and Lao families near the northern border, with the Buddhist calendar setting the town's festivals. Relations between highland communities and incoming settlers, and disputes over land and forest, are a live subject. Visitors are expected to go to villages with someone who knows them, to ask before photographing, and to treat cemeteries and spirit sites as closed.

About 17,000 people live in the town, in a province of some 184,000 spread thinly across forest and plateau, just over one per cent of Cambodia's population. Mornings begin early and cold in the dry season, with the market busy from before six; offices and schools run through to the early afternoon, and the town is quiet after dark apart from the food stalls by the lake. Red dust covers everything from January to April, and mud replaces it in the rains.

The economy has changed faster here than almost anywhere in Cambodia. Rubber, cashew, cassava and pepper plantations, many established as economic land concessions, have replaced large areas of forest, and agriculture, transport and trade in these crops employ most people. Logging, small-scale gem digging for zircon and other stones, and hydropower on the Sesan river have all left their mark, and land disputes between companies, settlers and indigenous communities over ancestral land and forest are long-running and sometimes bitter. Conservation organisations work in the parks north and west of the town, and tourism supports guesthouses, guides and drivers on a small scale.

Highland households combine upland rice, gardens and forest gathering with plantation work, and many young people leave for Phnom Penh or Vietnam for part of the year. Services are limited: the provincial hospital handles only basic cases, and serious illness means the long road to the capital.

Banlung's restaurants serve the food of lowland Cambodia — rice with grilled freshwater fish or pork, samlor machu, the sour tamarind soup, samlor korko thickened with roasted ground rice, beef lok lak with a lime and pepper dip, and nom banh chok, rice noodles in a green fish gravy, at breakfast. Prahok, the fermented fish paste, and tuk trey, fish sauce, season most of it.

Highland cooking is simpler and built on what the fields and forest give: upland rice, bamboo shoots, wild greens and mushrooms, small river fish, freshwater snails and crabs, chicken and pork at ceremonies, seasoned mostly with chilli, salt and herbs and often cooked in bamboo over an open fire. Krolan, sticky rice roasted with coconut and beans in a bamboo tube, is sold at the roadside, and jar rice wine, home-brewed from rice or cassava, is drunk through bamboo straws at festivals rather than sold in restaurants.

The province supplies a good deal of the country's fruit and nuts. Cashews are the dominant cash crop and are roasted and sold in the town; mangoes, avocados, jackfruit, durian and bananas come from the smallholdings; and Ratanakiri coffee, grown on the plateau, is served strong, iced and sweetened with condensed milk in cafés around the market and the lake.