Banlung is one of those towns you don't visit for itself, but for everything around it. Capital of the remote province of Ratanakiri, in the far northeast of Cambodia, it is a small, dusty town of red-earth streets, with a lively market, a town lake and a frontier air that already hints at the jungle, the mountains and the Indigenous cultures surrounding it. For travellers arriving in the northeast, Banlung is base camp: the place to eat, sleep, get cash and, above all, organise excursions to the wonders of Ratanakiri.
And those wonders are just around the corner. A few kilometres from Banlung lies the beautiful Yeak Laom crater lake, a volcanic crater filled with clear water where you can enjoy the best swim in the northeast; a trio of jungle waterfalls (Kachanh, Katieng, Cha Ong) tumbling through the vegetation; villages of the Tampuan, Jarai, Kreung and Brao peoples, with their own languages and traditions; and, further away, the deep jungle of Virachey National Park. Everything is organised from town, with guides, motorbikes or tuk-tuks.
This guide helps you use Banlung for what it is: the practical gateway to one of the wildest and most authentic corners of Cambodia. We tell you how to get there after a long journey from Phnom Penh, how to get around on the red-earth roads, which excursions to put together and what they cost, where to sleep and eat, and how to make the most of the town — its market, its lake — between outings. Banlung doesn't dazzle on its own, but it is the key to a region that does.
Banlung is a relatively young town: it became the capital of Ratanakiri in the 1970s, replacing the former provincial capital, Lumphat, which had been devastated by heavy US bombing during the Vietnam War. The whole province, remote and covered in jungle, was a key stage in 20th-century history: Vietnamese communists operated in the area from the 1940s, and in the mid-1960s the Khmer Rouge leadership, with Pol Pot, set up its insurgent base here, winning support among the Indigenous peoples of the highlands. After the war and decades of isolation, Banlung grew as the administrative and commercial centre of the northeast, and with better roads and Cambodia's opening to tourism it became the base from which travellers explore Yeak Laom lake, the waterfalls, the villages and the jungle of Ratanakiri. The full history of the region is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The highlands of the far northeast: hills, jungle and waterfalls, home to Cambodia's Indigenous peoples and far removed from the Khmer world of the plains.
Read the history of Northeast (mountains and jungle) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Banlung is a young town set in one of the longest-inhabited regions of Cambodia. Its red-dirt streets and frontier-town feel hide the fact that, as a town and as a capital, it has only a few decades of history. But the land around it, Ratanakiri province, was settled long before by the Indigenous highland peoples, the Khmer Loeu: Tampuan, Jarai, Kreung, Brao and others. They were animists, closely tied to the forest, and they lived here for centuries before any town existed.
The name itself speaks of that land. 'Banlung' (or Ban Lung) sits in the area of the 'red hill', and the whole province is called Ratanakiri, 'mountain of precious stones', after the sapphires and zircons in its soil. The red earth, fertile and dusty, is the mark of the place: it stains the roads, the rivers and even the traveller's clothes. It comes from the region's volcanic past, the same past that left the beautiful crater lake of Yeak Laom a few kilometres from town.
For almost all of its history, this remote corner lived outside the reach of Cambodia's central power. The Khmer kingdoms of the lowlands had little presence in these frontier forests, and the original peoples governed themselves with a great deal of autonomy. Banlung did not yet exist as a town. It was just part of a vast territory of villages scattered through the forest. Its birth as a capital would be tied, tragically, to the war that devastated the region in the 20th century.
To understand why Banlung is the capital of Ratanakiri, you have to talk about another town: Lumphat. Before Banlung, the provincial capital was Lumphat, a town on the banks of the Srepok River, further south. But Lumphat had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong moment in history. During the Vietnam War, Cambodia's remote northeast became a strategic theatre: Vietnamese communist forces used the region as a rear base and a supply route, and the Khmer Rouge had set up their insurgent base there.
The United States responded with a devastating bombing campaign. Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, US aircraft pounded much of eastern Cambodia in an effort to destroy the communist sanctuaries. Lumphat, as provincial capital and an important point in the area, was almost completely destroyed by the bombing. Today little remains of it beyond ruins and craters: a ghost town that bears witness to the brutality of that secret war waged over a land of Indigenous villages.
With Lumphat in ruins, the provincial capital moved in the 1970s to Banlung, which was better located and had better prospects. So Banlung became a town not through peaceful growth but as the replacement for a town flattened by bombs. In a way, its status as capital is a scar of the war, proof of how the conflict reshaped even the administrative map of this forgotten corner of Cambodia.
The history of Banlung and Ratanakiri is inseparable from that of the Khmer Rouge, because it was in these remote forests that much of Cambodia's tragedy took root. Vietnamese communists had been operating in the area since the 1940s, taking advantage of its isolation and its porous borders with Laos and Vietnam. In the mid-1960s, the leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the future Khmer Rouge, chose the northeast as the site of its insurgent base.
In 1963, Pol Pot and much of the communist leadership withdrew from Phnom Penh to the forests of Ratanakiri, where the party headquarters moved around 1966. There the guerrillas won the support of the Khmer Loeu peoples, exploiting the resentment many of these minorities felt towards the central government and its assimilation policy. Hundreds of Indigenous highlanders joined their ranks. When the region fell under Khmer Rouge control after the bombing and the central government's withdrawal in 1970, the northeast had become the seedbed of a movement that would soon take over the whole country.
The tragic irony is that the same peoples who fed the revolution later became its victims. When the Khmer Rouge took all of Cambodia in 1975 and imposed their genocidal regime, which in three and a half years killed around a quarter of the population through forced labour, hunger, disease and executions, the communities of Ratanakiri suffered uprooting, violence and attempts to wipe out their cultures, like the rest of Cambodia's people. The region that had been the cradle of the revolution was also scarred by its horror until the regime fell in 1979.
After the horror of the 1970s and the long decades of war, occupation and recovery that followed, Banlung slowly grew into the administrative and commercial centre of a Ratanakiri finally at peace. For a long time, getting here was still an odyssey along endless dusty roads. The town was a remote dead end on the map, barely connected to the rest of the country. But steadily improving roads and Cambodia's opening to tourism changed its role.
Today Banlung is above all the gateway to the northeast: the base from which travellers explore the wonders of Ratanakiri. Its central market, where Khmer people and members of the different Indigenous groups mix, its town lake, Boeng Kansaign, and its red-dirt streets make up a town without grand monuments but with character, practical and authentic. From here, guesthouses, agencies and local guides run trips to Yeak Laom lake, the waterfalls, the Indigenous villages and the deep forest of Virachey National Park.
Today the town and its province face quiet but decisive challenges. Deforestation, the spread of large plantations, illegal logging and mining are putting pressure on the forests and on the ancestral lands of the Indigenous peoples, whose way of life is under threat. Banlung, born from the ashes of a war that destroyed its predecessor Lumphat, has become the practical heart of a region that holds some of Cambodia's most fragile and fascinating landscapes and cultures. For travellers, it is the key to a territory that deserves to be discovered, and protected, with respect.
