Home on the Mountain

Most topaz miners 'commute' to and from their villages below. But a few live on the moutain-top, where small fruit orchards and vegetable gardens have been planted.

Our guide took us to the house of one man, who claimed to be more than seventy-years old. There we visited with him, took a look at his tools and the stones that he had recovered but rejected, unsellable quartz and topaz. Some of the discarded stones looked like rose quartz, another co-occuring mineral to aquamarine!

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On Top of the Mountain

The mountain is really a three-fold series of climbs. Near the very top, the view is almost breath-taking (the climb sure is). The vast flood plain of the Mekong is in clear view.

A nearby mountain is home to an ancient (probably Chenla) temple/monument. ($10 will get you a guide to take you up. On a motorbike!)

The hill we are on is strewn with boulders. Somehow it, and many similar hills across the generally flat land of central and southern Cambodia survived millenia of repeated rainy seasons and seasonal flooding.

I learned later that aquamarine and topaz are called pegmatite gemstones and occur in geologically similar conditions, along with rock crystal and smoky quartz, they "are formed in the vicinity of crystallizing granite bodies from the hydothermal solutions released by them" (Note One).

Whether the boulders I was seeing were pegmatite granite, I do not know, but the geological correlations indicate that where there is quartz and topaz, there may often also be aquamarine. The identification offered at the base of the mountain now seems less and less unlikely!

Note One: Bonewitz, Ronald Louis. "Rock and Gem: The definitive guide to rocks, minerals, gems and fossils", DK Books, page 35.

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Up The Mountain

The base of the mountain is very pleasant. Cambodians would visit, as might some tourists, even if Topaz had not been discovered.

A fresh water stream tumbles down the mountain-side, slipping around and over the large boulders strewn across the landscape.

A small dam has created a swimming hole and children bicycle out every afternoon to cool off after school. An easy path leads up and away from the base of the mountain, across a small metal bridge.

Locals say that most of the miners come from four or five surrounding villages and they are organized into 'platoons' (my word, can be as great as fifty men) once someone has identified a likely sight in the heights above. Most do not stay on the mountain but gather in the early morning hours and walk up; they come back down before dark.

Finding a mining site requires a local guide. There are lots of paths on the mountain. Mining dig sites are farther and farther from the start point, and active sites are difficult to find. I paid a guide $10 to take me up. After climbing for an hour and a half, and going about 5 kilometers (guide's estimate, I am abysmally poor at estimating distance), I thought that the price was more than fair.

It turned out that he was a wedding photographer, had good suggestions for photos, and since he knew the miners, could sweet talk them into letting me take pictures!

(Though the government has taken little notice of their efforts for the ten years that they have been at it, they continually worry that some day it might. By Cambodian law all mountain tops are state property. "Out of sight, out of mind" is probably their watchword.)

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