Sen Monorom

Mondulkiri was a frontier of the Khmer world rather than part of its heartland: the plateau was the country of the Bunong, who farmed rotating hill fields, kept and worked elephants and traded forest products down to the lowlands, largely outside the control of the kings at Angkor and later at Phnom Penh. The French administration brought the highlands into the colonial state in the early 20th century, mapping the plateau, encouraging rubber planting and establishing small posts.

Sen Monorom itself is a recent town. The province was created in 1961 out of the eastern part of Kratié by order of King Norodom Sihanouk, and Sen Monorom was set up as its capital in 1962. The Vietnam War reached the plateau: in the late 1960s Mondulkiri held bases of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, and bombing by American forces followed. The Khmer Rouge built their early bases in the Ratanakiri hills to the north, and Mondulkiri was heavily affected in the years that came after — like others in the province, the Bunong were displaced in the 1970s and were only allowed back to their homeland in the 1980s.

The town was rebuilt slowly after 1979, and for decades it was reached only by a rough track that took a day or more from the Mekong. The paving of National Highway 76 changed that, cutting the journey from Phnom Penh to a matter of hours and bringing traders, plantation companies and visitors. Since the 2000s the province has been transformed by rubber, cashew and cassava concessions, logging and land sales, while conservation projects and community tourism have grown alongside them. Sen Monorom has become the meeting point of both.

The town's character comes from the meeting of two worlds. Lowland Khmer officials, traders and soldiers make up much of the settled population and set its Buddhist calendar, with a pagoda, monks on the morning alms round and the national festivals marked as they are everywhere else in Cambodia. Around it lies Bunong country. The Bunong, also called Phnong, speak an Austroasiatic language of the Bahnaric branch, distantly related to Khmer, and their traditions centre on spirits of forest, river and rice field, on large communal ceremonies and on the long relationship between families and their elephants.

Rice wine drunk through bamboo straws from a shared jar marks weddings, harvests and welcomes, and the largest ceremonies involve offerings of jar wine and sacrificed animals to the spirits. Gongs, woven cloth and baskets are part of household life rather than performance, although weaving groups now sell to visitors in town. Elephants, once working animals in logging and transport, are now at the centre of the province's tourism, and the shift from riding to sanctuary-style care has been one of the notable local changes of recent years.

Manners in town are Cambodian: greetings with palms together, modest dress, quiet voices and care not to embarrass anyone in public. In the villages, visitors are guests on someone else's land, and the plain rule is to ask before entering, photographing or walking into forest that may be considered sacred.

Sen Monorom is small — something over 10,000 people, and even so the largest town in a province that is Cambodia's biggest by area and its most sparsely populated. It is nonetheless the place where everything in Mondulkiri happens: the provincial offices, the hospital, the secondary schools, the banks and the market are all here, and people come in from the communes by motorbike to use them.

The economy runs on agriculture and what has replaced the forest. Cashew, rubber, cassava, pepper, coffee, avocado and fruit are grown on the plateau; traders in town buy and truck the harvests down to Phnom Penh and Vietnam. Plantation concessions, logging and land speculation have reshaped the province and produced long-running disputes with Bunong communities over land they have farmed for generations. Tourism, mostly around elephants, trekking and waterfalls, supports guesthouses, drivers and guides, and it collapses in the wet season.

Days start early and cold by Cambodian standards, with mist on the hills and the market busiest before eight. Offices close through the hottest part of the afternoon, and the evening is short — restaurants fill soon after dark and the town is quiet by ten. Electricity and mobile coverage have improved greatly, but road access, water supply and health care remain the everyday concerns, and many young people leave for work in Phnom Penh or across the border.

Eating in Sen Monorom is Khmer cooking adapted to what the plateau grows. The staples are the same as everywhere in Cambodia: rice with a soup and a fried dish, kuy teav noodle soup for breakfast, bai sach chrouk — grilled pork with rice and pickles — from stalls in the morning, and lok lak, diced beef in a peppery sauce, on almost every menu. Prahok, the fermented fish paste, is the background flavour of much of it, and samlor korko, a thick mixed-vegetable soup, suits the local produce well.

The upland difference is in the ingredients. Bamboo shoots, wild greens, mushrooms and forest herbs appear in the market and in village cooking, with freshwater fish, chicken and pork rather than sea fish, and food seasoned simply with chilli, salt and lemongrass. Krolan, sticky rice with coconut and beans roasted in a bamboo tube, is sold along the roads into town. Rice wine, often home-made and drunk from a communal jar, belongs to ceremonies rather than restaurants.

Mondulkiri also produces things the rest of the country buys: cashews, wild honey, avocados, strawberries in a few plots and coffee grown on the hills, which the town's cafés roast and sell. Western-run cafés and bars serving the guesthouse trade sit alongside the Khmer restaurants, and iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk is the standard drink of the afternoon.