Battambang

It's the second largest city in Cambodia which is situated northwest of Phnom Penh, and is a 6 hour bus ride journey where you get to listen to Khmer pop/love songs over and over again (the same song sung by different people) for the 6 hours. I still have the tune in my head!  We took Friday off work and went on a day bus, where we got to see the rural scenery of Cambodia, lots of rice paddies. The bus itself was not too bad; we sat in the front row so we could see the road. The bus stopped frequently picking up passengers along the way who sat in the aisle on plastic chairs.

Battambang was a nice small city, laid back, where we could actually walk around and cross the street, and it wouldn't be a bad place to ride a bicycle. We really enjoyed the bamboo train which is a bamboo platform which sits on two axles and drives down old railway tracks for about 7km.  It goes pretty fast and is very bumpy as the tracks are not well aligned. No seat belts, no side rails, welcome to Cambodia! And as there is only one track, when another train comes from the opposite direction, one side has to take the train off the tracks and the passengers have to wait. On the other side we had some drinks, walked around to the brick factory, played with some kids, and shared some snacks... and of course as always in Asia, a girl from the shop and her father comes to us and asks us to tip the driver as they don't get paid much, even though they charged us $4 per person for the ride...$4x5=$20 that's a fair profit in Cambodia for one ride!

Anyways, after that we went to the one and only winery in Cambodia, $2 for a tasting... Red wine, grape juice, and ginger juice. In my opinion the wine was horrible, grape juice was disgusting, and the ginger was at least  tolerable...We shared the tasting as I wasn't that keen and am glad that we did because I wouldn't have finished mine. I really wanted coffee, but hey, its Cambodia, they ran out!

Our next stop was the old temple of Phnom Banan, where we had to climb approximately 300 rugged stairs to see temples that were built during the Angkor period. Quite run down but nice view from the top! Ascending down 300 of those big steps was quite challenging though!

And to our last destination! The killing caves and the bat caves which took a very long and interesting tuk tuk ride through the countryside with rice paddies and on unpaved roads which soon became muddy with the monsoon rain. This was interesting because all of a sudden our tuk tuk started making a funny sound and the driver kept looking at it... we thought the wheel was going to fall off as it started leaning to the right. We found out that the right side tire was flat when we finally got to a paved road.

So it was pouring, pouring, pouring and pouring... we ate lunch and waited and waited, but the rain didn't stop so we bought our $0.50 ponchos and walked up 700 steps up the mountain to find the killing cave and bat cave, which took us a while - there were no signs to direct us anywhere so it probably took us a good couple hours to find them. There were gorgeous views along the way though!  The killing cave was depressing as any other Khmer Rouge legacy that we have seen thus far, people were killed I guess on the cliff edge and their bodies were dropped down into this cave. The bat cave was a large cave at the bottom of the mountain which is a home to many many bats that fly out in hordes at 6:00pm every evening to find food.  Thousands flew out... we left before they were done leaving because there were so many!

Apparently the bamboo train is going to cease operation soon as they are going to replace the tracks and actually start a train service from Phnom Penh, so all those who plan to come to Cambodia, you probably won't see the bamboo train, but the other sites in Battambang are nice and it's a nice laid back little place!






More pics at: https://picasaweb.google.com/natsufujita/CambodiaJuneJuly?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCNjJ14zgnpap3QE&feat=directlink