Qualla: Kbal Chhay Waterfall

Kbal Chhay Waterfall: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Fussan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Turn the tap in a Sihanoukville hotel room and the water has come down out of the hills behind the city, from a waterfall most guests will never bother to visit. Kbal Chhay is not far — about seven kilometres out of town, then another nine along a track that turns the colour of paprika in the dry season and coats every vehicle, sandal and shin that travels it. What waits at the end is a broad spill of water over rock ledges, shaded, loud in the wet months, and busier with Cambodian families than with foreigners.

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Image: Stefan Fussan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kbal Chhay Waterfall: Why a New City Needed a Waterfall

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D.Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sihanoukville is younger than most of the people who live in it. The whole city was laid out from 1955 to serve Cambodia's first deep-water port, which meant building an entire city's infrastructure out of coastal scrub — including a water supply for a population that had not arr...

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Image: D.Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kbal Chhay Waterfall: The Years the Water Stopped

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. Then the arrangement ended, because the forest around the falls became a place for insurgents to disappear into — the communist movement that would become the Khmer Rouge. What had been a piece of municipal plumbing turned into contested ground, and for the next three decades Cam...

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Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kbal Chhay Waterfall: A Road, and Then Visitors

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. The falls came back into public life in 1998, when the Kok An Company cut a road into the area and developed the site for local and international tourists. That single act of construction is what makes Kbal Chhay what it is today. It is not a wilderness experience and does not pr...

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Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kbal Chhay Waterfall: Sixteen Kilometres of Laterite

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. The drive is half the character of the place. Once the sealed road runs out, the track to Kbal Chhay is laterite — the iron-rich soil that gives so much of southern Cambodia its rust-orange colour — and in the dry months it hangs in the air behind every motorbike as a fine red po...

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Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kbal Chhay Waterfall: Two Jobs at Once

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vladkras, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Royal Government of Cambodia has since taken the site back, and Kbal Chhay once again supplies clean water to the city below. That gives the place a double life not many attractions manage: a weekend picnic ground that is simultaneously working infrastructure. In the dry seas...

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Image: Vladkras | CC BY-SA 3.0