Chi Phat, and the forest that pays better standing up

The Cardamom Mountains, running along Cambodia's south-western border with Thailand, hold one of the larger remaining blocks of rainforest left in mainland Southeast Asia, a status owed less to deliberate protection over the centuries than to remoteness, difficult terrain and, for a long stretch of the twentieth century, its use as a stronghold by various armed groups, which kept large-scale development away almost by accident. What has changed more recently is how the villages within that forest make their living from it.

From chainsaw to guidebook

Chi Phat, a village on the Preak Piphot River inside the Cardamoms, was until the mid-2000s largely dependent on illegal logging and wildlife hunting, activities that were depleting the same forest the village depended on. With support from conservation organisations, the community shifted a significant part of its economy towards guided ecotourism instead, training former loggers and hunters as forest rangers and trekking guides, on the reasoning that a forest generating repeat income from visitors was, in the long run, worth more intact than cleared. It is not a complete or universally applied solution, and hunting and logging pressure has not vanished from the wider Cardamoms, but Chi Phat's shift is a genuine, sustained example rather than a marketing claim.

What the forest still holds

The Cardamoms support a wide range of wildlife, including gibbons, whose whooping calls are frequently heard well before any animal is seen, hornbills, and a long list of smaller mammals and birds, alongside occasional and much harder to confirm signs of larger animals such as elephants, whose populations here have been reduced but not eliminated. Guided treks from Chi Phat move through primary and secondary forest on foot or by mountain bike, over a network of trails and old logging tracks repurposed for the purpose, with local guides reading signs, tracks, calls, feeding damage, that a visitor would otherwise miss entirely.

The coast close by

South and east of the Cardamoms, the coastal towns of Kampot and Sihanoukville, along with the islands offshore including Koh Rong Sanloem, offer a different register of the same region: river towns known for pepper farming, limestone caves such as Phnom Chhnok with a small cave temple inside, and beaches reached by boat rather than road. Not every itinerary reaches the forest itself: some spend their south-western days on this coast instead, between the pepper farms of Kampot and the islands, and are worth knowing about if the sea appeals more than the trail.

A model tried in more than one village

Chi Phat is the best established of a small handful of community-based ecotourism projects that have taken a broadly similar approach across the Cardamoms and, elsewhere in Cambodia, around Tonle Sap and in parts of the northeast, generally with support from conservation organisations working alongside provincial authorities and the villages themselves. Results across these projects have been mixed rather than uniformly successful, dependent heavily on sustained visitor numbers, consistent management and continued external support, and Chi Phat's relative maturity, now running for close to two decades, makes it a useful reference point for what the approach can achieve given enough time, rather than a template that transfers automatically to every forest village that tries it.

Going in with the right expectations

Community-based ecotourism of this kind is, by design, less polished than a purpose-built lodge experience: accommodation in Chi Phat is simple, homestays and basic guesthouses rather than resort-standard rooms, guiding standards vary between individuals rather than following a single corporate script, and wildlife sightings, as anywhere in genuine rainforest, are never guaranteed. What it offers instead is a more direct link between the money a visitor spends and the specific forest and community it supports, which is, for a fair number of travellers, precisely the point, and a reasonable trade against a few extra comforts left behind for the duration of the trip.