Highway 48 is the only road connecting Koh Kong, up against the Thai border, to the rest of Cambodia. It runs roughly 100 kilometres southeast to Sre Ambel, where it meets Highway 4 - another 140 kilometres to Phnom Penh, or 90 to Sihanoukville - and along the way it is carried over five major rivers on five major bridges. A small town has grown at each crossing. Tatai is the closest of them to Koh Kong, about 19 kilometres east, and the next one along is Andoung Tuek. The economy amounts to feeding people who are on their way somewhere else: food stalls in every direction, no bank, no ATM. You can walk the whole place in a few minutes. Everything that makes Tatai worth stopping for is on the water, and the guesthouses will put you in a boat.

The Siamese crocodile is listed as critically endangered, with perhaps two to four hundred individuals left in the wild worldwide. Since 2000 researchers have identified around thirty sites in Cambodia where they persist, and the Tatai River, in Thma Bang district, is among the important ones. They are not the animal the word crocodile conjures - a modest freshwater species, shy, no meaningful danger to people. The danger has always run the other way: hunted out for the skin trade, then squeezed by dams, silt and lost nesting banks. Which is what made July 2024 remarkable. Sixty hatchlings emerged from five separate wild nests in the Cardamoms, the largest recorded wild breeding event for the species this century. Sixty animals is not a recovery. For a species that was officially gone, it is an argument.

Most of the country upriver of Tatai now sits inside Southern Cardamom National Park, gazetted on 9 May 2016 across 4,104 square kilometres and stitched to neighbouring reserves into a protected block of 18,211 square kilometres. It shelters more than sixty globally threatened animals - sun bears, Sunda pangolins, pileated gibbons - and seventeen endangered tree species, some found nowhere else. Rangers pulled more than 100,000 wire snares out of these protected areas by 2018. Cambodia's last wild tiger was recorded in 2007, and the park is being managed partly on the hope of bringing them back. The other claim on this water is written in concrete: the Stung Tatay hydropower station - stung is simply Khmer for river - came online in 2014 with three 82-megawatt turbines, 246 megawatts in all. Rivers in the Cardamoms are now assets on two different balance sheets.

The Chong are one of the Pearic peoples, and they were farming these valleys long before Highway 48 was surveyed. Their agriculture is rotational: clear, plant, move on, let the forest come back. That practice does not sit comfortably inside a modern conservation boundary, and it sat particularly badly inside the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project, which sells carbon credits generated by keeping this forest standing. Human Rights Watch documented Chong families being pushed off land they had worked for generations, and the credit registry Verra opened an investigation. Nobody in that dispute is arguing the forest should be logged. The argument is about who is asked to pay for saving it, and the answer so far has too often been the people with the least. Meanwhile the river keeps running under the bridge at Tatai, carrying crocodiles that were declared gone.