Battambang Water festival

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I awoke and checked the watch, I was just settling back to sleep for another hour when the phone rings. The front desk tell Lou, who had been woken by the phone, something which she doesn’t understand and I can’t hear. (To be honest it isn’t hard to confuse Lou 10 seconds after she wakes) It seems that the bus company have decided to arbitrarily change our ticket time from 10:30 to 07:30 without any warning.

We haven’t packed yet, we certainly haven’t woken up yet, and there is no way we can get on a bus in the next 15 minutes let alone 2 minutes. Lou asks the desk what we can do and luckily they agree to sort it out for us.

We attempt to doze but it isn’t working for me so I get up. I’m still not feeling great, so I run a bath. This is the third in as many days and a luxury that I wouldn’t normally take advantage of at home let alone waste time doing on holiday, but one of the effects of the illness are aches and bathing does help.

By the time I finally get out of the bath, the alarm to wake us up is sounding and Lou is stirring slowly. We have a breakfast and quiz the front desk about what is happening to our tickets and the money. They refund us the money and explain that the company have cancelled their bus at 10:30 because of problems with the road being flooded. Before this has really sunk in we are asking if anybody else has a bus going to Battambang today? If so can we get a ticket on one of them? The desk agrees to sort it out and so we return to our room to pack our bags.

An hour later and we descend the stairs again to utilise the computers and do some admin and generally waste time until our 12:30 pick up for our 13:30 bus.

I should have realised that 12:30 was a bit early for a 13:30 bus, and sure enough when a minibus arrives at 12:30 it isn’t ours but somebody else’s. The minibus pickup arrives closer to 13:15, but by this point we are just grateful we can still leave today.

We eventually boarded our bus and it was a not bad, and more than passable. On our exit from Siem Reap it seemed strange to be just the two of us for the first time in nearly a month, having said goodbye to our American travelling partners the night before. The strangeness of the journey soon escalated as we navigated over sand drifts a couple of feet deep across the road, extremely rutted road surfaces, and crossed to the other side of the carriageway to avoid flooded areas. It is only now that I start to worry that if one bus company are cancelling services because of flooded roads the other companies may also be effected. However it is too late to worry about it now.

Luckily this road chaos was relatively short lived as it appeared to be limited to the first short road connecting us to the national highway. Unfortunately once upon the highway, the driver started to use the extremely loud horn as if he had learnt to drive in Vietnam. I would have liked to say that this staccato noise subsided during the journey, or even persisted however the truth was it was less staccato more legato forte.

Our original plan had been to get the 10:30 bus meaning we would arrive in Battambang at about 14:30, our delay had us fearing that we would be arriving in the dark, in a town that we didn’t know without a reservation. Either the first bus company we had been due to travel with had programmed in a long lunch stop or our bus driver had a lead foot because we arrived an hour earlier than we had expected. It was a normal arrival to the usual throng of tuk tuk drivers hawking for your business. We selected a guy and got in asking for a hotel that we had been recommended by the owner of the hotel in Siem Reap as we left, and our driver took us there for 50 cents, no wonder really when unbeknownst to us it was actually about 200yds from the bus stop and we could have walked it.

The hotel has large and spacious rooms, albeit kitted out with large dark wooden furniture far from our taste, but it was fine by us and afterwards we commented to each other how easy it was.

We made a swift turnaround before heading out for food as we had completely missed lunch and were about ready to knaw off an arm to sate the hunger pangs. Our first impressions of this town are not great as it seems a little run down and rough around the edges but maybe we are missing something. We arrive at a café that the guidebook recommends and order our dinner, which I have to say was disappointing but I attacked with gusto anyway due mainly to the extreme hunger which would have allowed me to eat almost anything.

Despite doing less today from a physical point of view than on nearly any other day we decided that neither of us was keen to explore this place in the dark and so headed back to the hotel room to generally chill out, utilise the decent wifi connection and watch some TV something we haven’t indulged in for a while, which is a good job really as the selection of channels that you get given mean that you can’t watch for too long before the same program comes around again!

On awaking this morning both of us were struggling to get up. Despite the bed being comfortable our sleep had been somewhat disturbed. The window of our room faces onto a road which is not far from the bus stops for the various companies that offer coach travel around the country, resulting in the coaches using it as an informal coach park. Thus we were woken by loud diesel engines starting up throughout the night. Lou also complained that she had been too cold, the issue of what temperature to set the aircon at overnight has still not been resolved 100% even this far into our trip! The disturbed sleep led to a very lazy morning and when we eventually did venture out it was the afternoon. We walked towards the river and as we got closer the traffic increased almost exponentially, until we arrived there and discovered that there were boat races going on. It turns out that we have stumbled upon the Water Festival. I don’t know much about this festival here as all the info suggests that it only takes place in the capital and Siem Reap, and when I last looked the internet told me it wasn’t for another month! What little I do know is that it is held to celebrate one of two things (possibly both) primarily the changing of the water of the Tonle Sap lake.

To explain this you have to believe me when I tell you that the Tonle Sap lake in the middle of the country is fed from a number of tributaries but the one that connects it with the Mekong, the Tonle Sap river changes direction! In the dry season it flows as any other river would, with gravity towards the sea, but during the rainy season the volume of water in the Mekong makes this river reverse its flow into the lake causing the water level to increase. This phenomenon is the main reason for the lakes abundance of aquatic life and this is attributed along with the fertility of the soil for Cambodia’s continued “success” The festival celebrates the river returning to normal after the rains and the fish that the water leaves behind.

It also seems to be a military tradition that when a Khmer King goes to war he does so with a navy, mainly as pre-roads this would have been the most effective method of moving both people and goods in a country such as this. This festival allows the people of the various towns and provinces to bring a boat and race each other with the best rowers gaining favour with the king to assist him in the event of an invasion or expansionist campaign. Whilst this aspect of the festival is clearly not required anymore it is celebrated nonetheless as high kudos to win races, especially against local rivals. This festival however is the local version and not the national one so if all of the above actually applies I'm not sure.

From first hand experience however the crews of these boats which range in number from about 20 in the smaller boats up to about 50 in the larger ones do not seem to be the well tuned athletes the previous passage may imply. Rather they are a collection of average joes who are smoking cigarettes between races and drinking beer. The whole event here is like Sunday league football meets the boat race.

We wandered the banks of the river for a while before heading away from the throngs in an attempt to find some lunch. With this achieved we remembered that we needed to take our malaria pills and hadn’t brought them out with us so headed back to the hotel.

By this time Lou was not feeling very good and so after a while I left her to sleep whilst I headed out back to the crowds of people and the festival. I wandered the banks of the river doing a huge circuit from one bridge near the finish of the course, along the west bank to the bridge at the start of the course and back up the east bank. During this circuit I saw some very interesting sights. The various highly coloured stalls all draped with sponsorship usually from either a beer brand, Angkor, Cheers, etc or a mobile phone shop/company were selling everything you can imagine. Popcorn, waffles, some kind of sweet in a bag made by chopping up something that looked like sugarcane and dousing it in a redbullesque energy drink called sting. All manner of foods from baguettes filled with assorted meat and veg to baskets of chillied cockroaches and locusts. There were fair stalls - it is a strange thing but here on the other side of the world the fair stalls are more or less the same as those you would find at home. Knock the triangle of stacked cans off a shelf by throwing a ball, and win a prize. Throw a washing up bowl over a bottle placed on the floor (slightly more rudimentary than a hoop but the same effect) also there were some rides for both kids and adults. The “ferris wheel” was possibly the scariest thing I have seen in a fairground. The standards of health and safety here are not good and you wouldn’t have got me in that thing even though I love fair rides. For one the cage would probably struggle to house me given it appeared to struggle with some Cambodian teenagers, but more importantly the speed the operator sent the cages around was scary, some cages hit horizontal at point. I was astounded to see parents putting their toddlers into the cages unaccompanied, and without the benefit of any kind of strap in the cage! Even more astounding was when they got out the toddlers weren’t crying!

Amongst the stalls I even spotted an agriculture stand where they were selling tractors - it made me thing of the Royal Cornwall Show.

When I returned from the festivities it was starting to get dark, so Lou and I popped out to a nearby restaurant to grab a bite to eat. The darkness had brought out the insects and we were glad that our eating house of choice had glass doors at the front keeping the insects out on the whole. Especially when the security guard hung up some fly paper around the lights to thin out the insect population - the paper didn’t last long due to the numbers of insects present. We headed home to the hotel after an interesting end to an interesting day.

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Photos

Locals coming to watch the races
on a local tractor and trailer combination

A big dragon boat
turning in the river after the race.

Preparing sugar cane
Prior to putting it throught the press to make the local sugar syrup drink.

Scary Ferris Wheel
Note the angle of the top cage!

The big cooking pots
in the team area