Mondulkiri is a plateau of grass hills, pine and red earth at 800 metres in eastern Cambodia, and it is the one corner of the country where you want a jacket at breakfast. December and January mornings can fall below twenty degrees. Height does it: the hills stay green long after the lowlands have dried out, and Merkus pine grows here in open groves and nowhere else in Cambodia. The plateau is Bunong country, and for the Bunong an elephant is not livestock but family: named, inherited down the generations, mourned when it dies. About seventy captive elephants are left in the whole country. The camps here take them out of work rather than into it. No rides, no tricks, no feeding: you walk behind an animal while it strips bark, throws dust over its back and dozes, with its Bunong mahout alongside. Roughly half still belong to the families, who are paid to let them retire into the forest; their mahouts come too.
Bou Sra falls in three steps, and the middle one shakes the air: a broad curtain that lands hard enough to throw spray back up the gorge and hold a rainbow in it. It is heaviest as the monsoon ends. Romanear, southeast of the town, is the opposite: a low, wide curtain over a ledge with pools shallow enough to sit in. From the ridge they call Samot Cheur, the forest sea, the canopy rolls to the horizon with no road, roof or field in it. Under that canopy is Keo Seima, which holds something like 25,000 black-shanked doucs, almost the whole species; the next largest group, in Vietnam, is about five hundred. The gibbons are the reason for the dark start. You leave the bamboo camp before dawn and wait in the trees until a pair begins a rising, whooping duet that carries a kilometre, and your Bunong guide walks you straight at it. The family overhead stopped minding people years ago. Nobody fed them and nobody tamed them; it took years of following one group from its first call to dusk, simply being there.