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Published: December 12th 2009
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Battambang
Cambodian Snow After 11 hours on a bus through rice fields, villages and towns (change of bus at Phnom Penh), we jumped on a tuk tuk straight to a hotel in serious need of showers, food and a stretch. Battambang, and the hotel (Royal Hotel no less!), had a great feel to it - very relaxed, sleepy town obviously making the most of tourism with lots of visitors wandering around. We went for a wee walk that night, at about 9pm, but everything was shut...excepting a textile shop for some reason! We reckoned we were going to enjoy this, and the area did not disappoint.
The next day we hired two motorbikes with drivers/guides for one of the best days so far. The guides (from an outfit based outside the hotel) spoke excellent English, were really friendly and interesting, and quite funny....and drove well! Generally, I was amazed by the really good English people spoke around here - seemed better than elsewhere in Cambodia so far - and really impressive given the amount of teachers and educated people who were executed by the Khmer Rouge, there must have been a real push for education as part of the country's recovery.
The
Battambang
Temple in the Killing Caves day trip took us through rice fields and orchards, and loads of lovely villages awash with waving kids. Much of the trip was along dirt roads and, it being the beginning of the dry season, before long we were red with what our guides called 'Cambodian snow'. The dust was amazing - everything within 20m of the roads was red - trees, plants, houses, even the most docile (which, to be fair, is all of them) of the cows - everything was sepia. Every now and then, an alien flash of colour would stand out - a glossy banana leaf which the dust could not get purchase on, or violent colours of newly opened flowers - carpets of a small purple bindweed type flower, or large red lotus and water lily flowers. I was, in particular, the source of many chuckles whenever we stopped (not least from my lovely wife), the dust sticking very well to my sun cream!
Our first stop was a Buddhist temple where a young monk tested his English on us, and then to Phnom Sampeau - a large hill with a series of Buddhist temples giving amazing views of the countryside, the plumes of
Battambang
Phnom Banan dust along the roads standing out as a read streak through the otherwise bright green rice fields. One of the temples here had been used as a Khmer Rouge prison, and nearby deep caves were used to kill prisoners - the people bludgeoned at the top and then thrown down in to the caves to die if now already dead. One cave for the educated, one for 'others' and one for children. We went down in to one of the caves where a shrine had been created, including a small temple with skulls of the murdered. This was somehow much more hard hitting than the sites of Phnom Penn, possibly due to reduced tourist numbers and the serenity of the area now. We had a young local guide for this area, he works in the morning with school in the afternoon - his English was great.
From here we moved on to Phnom Banan, an 11th Century crumbling Angkor stone temple with beautiful carvings on top of a high hill. Then to a monastry to say hello to a colony of fruit bats, hanging from the tips of the branches, squaking and wheeling overhead, the guides following great ecological
Battambang
Carvings at Phnom Banan tradition and hitting the tree to make them fly! There was a bit of a stink, and behind my awe (and Rach's gaurded interest!) was a slight nervousness that we may be hit by wee - the guides cheerfuly telling us that the bats simply piss all over themselves as they hang upside down, and not to keep your eyes to wide open as you stare up.
Then from here we headed to a 'station' for the bamboo railway - a palm leaf shelter with an old couple selling drinks and snacks. The bamboo railway is an old rail network running through Cambodia. The 'carriages' consist of a pair of metal wheels hoisted in to place on the tracks, with a metal and bamboo platform placed on top, and a petrol motor to drive the back wheels. We got on with our guides, the motorbikes, the train driver (!) and a couple of kids along for the ride, and zoomed off, faster than expected, through the countryside. Great fun, although at each join in the track it felt like your spine was being jolted up though the top of your head! Eventually we met another train coming in the
Battambang
Which ends the head - cunning butterfly! opposite direction - usually the least loaded train would be unloaded and hoisted off the tracks to allow the other to pass, but as we were nearly at our jumping off point we give way and carried on on motorbike...our train driver hauling the platform and motor around 180 degrees to head back.
It was a great day! The next day we were up early again, to go by boat from Battambang to Siem Reap.
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Joe
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badda bamboo bing
Nice video, shame you didn't capture any weeing though. By the bats I mean.