How Your Stay Keeps the Forest Standing
Situated in a protected area of Botum Sakor National Park on the Preak Tachan River, Cardamom Tented Camp is uniquely different from most ecolodges in that delivers much more than just a sustainable tourism experience.
In addition to offering guests a whole range of exciting outdoor activities, geared towards assisting nature conservation in the park, our presence on the 18,073-hectare (180 km2) concession of park land, granted to us by the Royal Government of Cambodia in 2009, directly helps to protect this fast-disappearing natural habitat and keep the forest standing.
Since its establishment in 1993, Botum Sakor National Park’s pristine biodiversity, which covers a vast 171,250 hectares (1,712.5 km²), has come under increasing threat of destruction from illegal logging, land grabbing, poaching and illegal sand dredging along its rivers.
In 2010, the Cambodian government began granting economic land concessions to scores of companies inside Botum Sakor, leading to a loss of over 119,000 hectares to construction. Neighboring concessions to ours have been taken over by companies that cut down indigenous timber and replace it with rubber and palm oil monocultures, which cannot sustain wildlife diversity. In addition, swathes of evergreen forest have been destroyed by illegal logging.
What’s more, an unchecked culture of poaching in Cambodia by local hunters and wildlife traffickers, threatens the park’s abundant wildlife. A four-year study completed by NGO Frontier Cambodia recorded evidence of at least 49 species of mammals within the park’s boundaries, eight of which are listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.
At Cardamom Tented Camp, we are dedicated to helping protect the park. Each booking at Cardamom Tented Camp directly helps power the efforts we and our partners take to protect the park’s natural resources.
By partnering with the Wildlife Alliance, who provide us with 12 trained forest rangers that sometimes spend days at a time camped deep in the jungle to catch poachers and illegal loggers. Your stay with us helps to support these rangers and ensures that they can provide on-the-ground protection to Cambodia’s Cardamom rainforest, one of the last unfragmented jungle habitats in Southeast Asia.
During your stay at Cardamom Tented Camp, you’ll also have the chance to join a patrol with the Wildlife Alliance rangers and go trekking through the dense Cambodian jungle along abandoned poaching and logging trails. Along your way, stop off at the Ranger Station where the confiscated equipment of poachers and loggers – including traps, improvised hunting rifles and even chainsaws – is on display.
At Cardamon Tented Camp we also work with the nearby Trapeang Rung Community, teaching an awareness of the park’s importance as a source of sustainable income, as well as approaches to sustainable farming, such as composting and soil management.
By bridging the culture gap between open-minded travellers and resident communities in the area, Cardamom Tented Camp is helping to communicate the need for conservation efforts that could one day turn the tide against the destruction of Botum Sakor’s natural resources.
Another way you can contribute towards the conservation of some of the world’s most threatened species and their habitat in the Cardamom Mountains is to make a donation, or purchase an item on our Amazon Wish List.
