What lies beneath

Sakada Sakhoeun has taken the mountain path from Siem Reap to Phnom Kulen every week for the past five years. Driving on the mountain is tough and the 28-year-old archaeologist has done it in the worst conditions: at night, lost, in the rain – when roads turn to rivers and it takes four people to pull his dirt bike from the mud. But what he’s most worried about is what lies behind the thin curtain of trees that shrouds the main road: fields upon fields of cashew nut trees. “You can see the line beyond the road – there are no trees, all cashew nut plantations,” says Sakhoeun, slowing his dirt bike to point out the end of the forest cover. Some 80 per cent of the forest on Phnom Kulen – one of Cambodia’s National Parks – has disappeared due to a combination of illegal logging, destructive farming practices like slash and burn, and a growing trend towards cashew nut cultivation. Even as recently as 2009, when Sakhoeun started working here with the Archeology and Development Foundation, the forest was fairly lush, he says. But of the 37,000 hectares of original natural forest, a little more than 8,000 remain.