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Today was yet another tour, this time it was the one that I'd been most excited about since I had found out about it. Our tour guide today was Lucky, we were sat in the hotel reception and waiting for today's minibus to come and pick us up. Lucky came into the reception, introduced himself and led us out. We soon realised that there was no minibus and we had a private tour.
Today's destination was Battambang and was quite a drive from Siem Reap which took us about 2 hours 4o mins. On the road there, the Cambodia equivalent to a motorway, we saw what was effectively a lawn-mower with a trailer doing about 40 km/hr.
As we came into Battambang, we started to notice that all of the roundabouts were highly decorated with characters.
Our first stop in Battambang was the Central Market, an Art Deco building. We walked through the market and as we did Lucky bought for us some fruits to try, he bought Meat Fruit and Sweetsop (also known as custard apples).
In Cambodia the locals mostly pay via QR codes and the stall holders have a bunch of QR codes that represent different values. For tourist for expensive items (above $10.00) they use US Dollars and for cheaper items (less than $10.00) they use Cambodian Riel, it can get really confusing very quickly especially when you get your change in both US Dollars and Riel. The value of riel does not have much value and in the shops they have massive bundles of it lying around in cupboards.
Moving on from the market, we walked through the Svay Por district and saw some graffiti. There were many French influenced building with verandas, many of them adorned with graffiti.
The next stop was to a family business where they were making rice paper and using the rice paper to make fresh and fried spring rolls. They had been making the rice paper for many generations, the lady we saw was sat in front of a fire, in the 34ºc heat, steaming the liquid rice paste to make the rice paper, she had to make 1500 per day 7 days a week. They were also raising chickens to eat and for cock fighting, Lucky explained that for 1 chicken for food they would get about $1 USD and for a good fighting cock they could get $100 USD.
On the way to the next stop we cross the Prek Daun Teav a stream off the Sangker River. This was not on our agenda for the day, but Lucky was intrigued as we were. We stopped because there were loads of fishermen fishing. Some of them were in boats in the stream while others were on the banks.
All of the fishermen were throwing huge nets into the water, leaving them there for a few minutes before hauling them back in. Their nets were full of about 100 small fish each time.
After the delight of the fishing we went on to Samrong Krong killing fields. Before the Khmer Rouge arrived at Samrong Krong it was a Buddhist temple. They let the monks stay, but made them do manual labour and they were not allowed to wear their robes, by the end there were only 11 monks that had stayed on.
One of the area of the killing fields was a pond that the prisoners were able to wash, once a week. This was also the same location that the monks had to throw in the human excrement from the prison cells.
Over all this was a very horrible place to learn about and totally terrible thing to have happened in my own life time. It is just horrendous that genocide is still happening in this world.
After we had stopped off for lunch we moved on to the Bamboo train. The bamboo train is a bamboo platform, about 2 metres by 2 metres, which sits atop 2 axels with small railway wheels, it is driving by a lawnmower motor and a pulley. The driver built the train, we sat upon it and then off we went. It wasn't long before we encountered another bamboo train coming towards us, both trains stopped and our train was dismantled and then the other train shot off. We waited a few minutes for the next train coming towards us, once it arrived it stopped and the 2 drivers rebuilt our train and we were off again.
We traveled 6km to the end where there was some stalls selling drinks and souvenirs. We had to wait here for a while because the, real, Battambang to Phnom Penh train was coming down the tracks. Once the train had passed our driver rebuilt our bamboo train and off we set, on tghe way back we only had to stop for the other trains but ours remained on the track while the others were dismantled. On the way back I started an activity on Strava so that I could find out just how fast the Bamboo train was traveling, the average speed was 25.8km/h but the maximum speed was 30.2 km/h.
After the Bamboo train ride we went on to see the hanging bridge. We walked across this bridge and while doing so we were passed by a number of bicycles and scooters. The bridge was a suspension bridge about 1.5 metres wide and made of steel cables, wooden deck and chicken wire sides.
We then head out of the town and into the countryside to the Phnom Sampeau killing caves. Lucky asked if we wanted to walk up the hill to the caves or to get a 4x4 truck to drive us up there. We chose the 4x4 and were delighted we did, it was quite a trek to the top.
Lucky took us around the top of the hill to show us the caves. The men, women and children were taken to different parts of the hill to be killed and then their corpses were thrown into different caves.
We then looked around the Buddhist temple at the top of the hill and watched yet another Cambodian sunset.
Once the sun had set we got the 4x4 back down to the bottom to the Phnom Sampov Bat Cave. this was the main reason to come on this tour, I wanted to witness the mass exodus of millions of wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bats.
We had to wait a while for dusk and then the bats started to fly out of the cave, I filmed the very small bats flying out of the cave, I filmed for 10 minutes until it became to dark to see, the bats still continued for a long time after. The locals seem to believe there are about 30 million bats each day.
Lucky then drove us back to Siem Reap and we decided to go back to the French restaurant from last night and then to the craft beer bar. An amazing Baturday.