HotelChatter

Le Relais du Chlong is a hotel in a mansion set inside dense foliage beside the Mekong River about an hour-and-a-half drive south of Kratie’s provincial capital in Cambodia’s northeast.

Villagers living in the surrounding town avoid the place because of its ghosts. The haunting atmosphere of the estate makes it one of the few places where you can actually feel Cambodia’s rich past. A wealthy Sino-Khmer family, once the biggest landowner in Kratie province, built the house in 1916. In the late 1960s, the Khmer Rouge seized control of the town, moving its forces into the most desirable buildings, including the mansion and used it as both a hideout and a prison. Inside the basement, which is no more than a metre high, bones of some who died there remain.

Vietnamese soldiers seized the town sometime before the Khmer Rouge’s demise in 1979. They occupied the buildings as well, though treated the locals with more benevolence. “Life was better when the Vietnamese came,” recalled Yong Sen, a 77-year-old widow who now lives at a nearby pagoda. When a Frenchman bought Le Relais du Chlong in 2004, there was a hole in the roof and an unexploded B-52 bomb lay in the basement where it had crashed decades earlier.

In May 2008, two married couples, including a royal Cambodian princess, bought the estate. They added a swimming pool next to the house and in August, they closed the hotel for a year of renovations, says owner Ansieau La Planeta. Their plans also include a new, four-room house next to the original in a similar, though subtler, style. The hotel will reopen in October 2010 with rooms from $60 to $110.

La Planeta insists the changes will not alter the estate’s eerie, mystical atmosphere. “We want to keep the atmosphere of [an] Agatha Christie [novel],” he says, “without the crime.”