Battambang

Trip Start May 08, 2008
1
5
25
Trip End Ongoing


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Friday, May 23, 2008

The bus journey to Battambang (apparently its pronounced Battambong) passed off without a hitch and we arrived to be confronted with the standard procedure of touts everywhere. We went with one who took us to the hotel we were going to anyway, turns out he wasn't getting a commission so no rip off there. His name was Harry and with excellent English he explained that he operates as a moto tour guide, so after a good chat with him we decided he was sound and arranged our tour for the next morning to a few local sights. All sights seem to be at least 15km away in different directions so a guide was definitely the best option.

Battambang is a somewhat sleepy town (I say town but its got over 100,000 people) with a nice laidback pace of life. Our tour was pretty good the next day. We set off at 10am, Maria on the back of Harry's motorbike and me on the back of his friend Benny's. Neither gave us their real names, Benny because his is too difficult for Westerners to remember and Harry because he thinks his real name is a bit girly. So first to the hilltop pagoda, Wat Samleoung, where there is a cave on the hillside where the Khmer Rouge killed a few thousand people, bashing in their skulls and throwing them through the hole in the top of the cave to fall 15m. That generally finished the job if they hadn't hit them hard enough. Grisly place.

Next up was Wat Banan, sometimes referred to as Mini Angkor. Even older than Angkor Wat, it was our first taste of the Khmer style and we were impressed. over 300 stone steps, with a carved balustrade all the way, led to the brick temples. Five towers still standing after more than 1000 years looked impressive. It was a hindu temple too but didn't have all that much left in the way of iconography.

After that we took in a couple of other minor local sights including a tree where lots of massive fruit bats reside before taking the "bamboo train" back to Battambang. This is an interesting idea. The Cambodian rail network is pretty abysmal with two lines only, one north from Phnom Penh and one south. The rails are in a pretty bad state with gaps everywhere and curves on some of the tracks. Trains only run at about 30km/h so the journeys are pretty ridiculous. However for anyone living near the lines they are a good way of moving people and goods up and down. Basically they've cannibalised old carriage wheels and rigged what is effectively a lawnmower engine to them, with passengers sitting on a bamboo platform resting on top. All of this whizzes along at about 40km/h, faster than the actual trains but it hurts the arse terribly when they fly over the gaps between the tracks. Good fun though, even if I had to question where the price of $10 came from for 15 minutes!

We had decided to take the boat from here to Siem Reap for the Angkor temples in spite of some stories of crazy delays which we had heard. The main downside of this was the 7am departure, but as it turned out the journey was surprisingly okay and we arrived on time, having had a good look at some of hte floating villages along the way.
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