Advertisement
Published: December 13th 2008
After talking to a few people I was a little worried about Battambang, one guy called it the whore house of Cambodia and judging by the initial drive through the city and the hotel we stayed in it looked like they might have been right.
Turns out they were wrong, we had another moped tour organised similar to the one we had done in Hue. The tour visited small out of town family run operations that make rice paper, grind rice, catch and cook water snake (we all tried a bit, tastes like fishy chicken) and a fish market. It was a really nice getting out of the city and seeing some real Cambodian life and I loved all the kids who jumped up and down waving and shouting “hello”.
Finally we visited a temple that was used by the Khmer Rouge as a torture and detention centre, the gardens where also used as mass graves similar to S21 and the killing fields in Phnom Penh. There’s now a monument filled with the skulls and bones of those that were found in the graves. My moped driver told me how he was recruited to the Khmer rouge when he
was 9 years old, but fled to Thailand (which took 3 weeks of walking) soon after and joined the army. He told me that he had lost half his family to Pol Pot’s regime.
We only had one night in Battambang and we were up bright and early the following day for an 8 hour drive to Bangkok. I’ve got a week here before Pam arrives and don’t really want to stay in the city so I’ve booked a flight down to Ko Sumui to meet up with some of the guys I met on the tour, should be a laugh.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.06s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0344s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
