Battambang and Beyond

I wrote this while sitting in the G Adventures mini bus as we drove from Battambang back to Siem Reap.  This mini bus trip turned out to be much faster and more comfortable than the public bus that I took the day before in the other direction.

I finished my time with CFC a few days ago.  I showed them some final experiments including a highly successful DNA extraction experiment and the demonstration of Newton's 1st Law where you knock a tray out from underneath an egg balanced on a toilet paper roll, and the egg drops into a glass of water.

 Chanda an Kimry took me to a very nice local restaurant that serves only vegetarian food that is off the beaten tourist track but very beautiful with comfortable shaded tables and lush vegetation.  I would recommend that place, called the Vitking House to anyone.

My last few free days in Siem Reap were spent doing some shopping, and a fair bit of just hanging around.  I have grown very fond of the kind staff at the Golden Temple Villa as well as a lovely Australian woman called Robyn.  She and I have shared many pleasant dinners at the gorgeous establishments run by NGOs, and have also shared shopping tips and stories.  It's funny because I have now spent enough time in Cambodia to come to the realization that even though I know more about this country than most tourists, there is so much more that I could know.  For example, it feels very good to spend a lot of money at a restaurant that is run by an NGO and offers training services to poor kids from provincial towns but this is not the only way to help the Khmer by spending your money.

You can also simply eat at the small local restaurants, and even eating and shopping at tourist restaurants that are not run by NGOs still provides work and security for many people.

Yesterday, I took the public bus to Battambang.  It was a bit of an adventure in and of itself really (as you would expect).  A shuttle picked me up at 10:30am, and then drove around picking up other passengers in the immediate area.  It then dropped us off at a bus depot where we boarded a larger bus.  We then drove to the outskirts of town, and changed buses again and it was at this point that we had our tickets collected.  But what is really odd, is that we then drove all the way back into town to the ORIGINAL bus depot - which by the way was a 3 minute walk from my hotel - and picked up a couple more tourists.  I really don't understand that.  Anyway, we were then on our way.  The bus was old and not terribly comfortable by western standards, and we kept stopping to pick people up.  There were times when we even picked up locals who then got dropped just a short distance away.  For about an hour of the journey, I had a woman and two small children squished in the single seat beside me.  This was definitely a deluxe bus though because it had AC (that sometimes struggled a bit it's true), and also a single small television monitor at the front.  I got to watch an action film starring Tony Jaa (remember Ong Bak, Thai Warrior???) and it was dubbed into Khmer from the original Thai.  Once that movie was over, we watched a series of music videos for Khmer Top 40 tunes.

The bus pulled into the bus terminal about 3km outside of Battambang city and I had no trouble getting a tuk tuk to take me to the hotel where the G group was.  I knew that they were arriving at approximately the same time that I was so when I arrived I went to the front desk and asked if the group was here yet.  The two women behind the counter had the strangest looks on their faces and one of them make a half gesture to behind me.  It was then that I heard 'Hello' and turned around to see Kevin - my tour guide from the first time I was in Cambodia - waiting behind me.  He had hid in the corner waiting for me and was behind me the entire time!  I was so surprised because I did not think that he was doing the tour at all and in fact he had already wished me well even though he wouldn't be there!  I had told him that I had booked this tour and in fact requested him and I had just assumed that he had been scheduled to another tour as per usual.  Anyway, I was very surprised, and after scolding him soundly for tricking me, and an now happily settling into this portion of my vacation.

 Last night the group walked around the faded glory of the city of Battambang.  The architecture is gorgeous with simply beautiful french balconies and iron-worked windows on french doors.  The roofs are sometimes tiled with peeling tile, sometimes with that red ceramic, and sometimes with the ubiquitous tin.  We had an absolutely delicious dinner and an early night because many people were jet-lagged, and there is not much night life in Battambang, especially in low season, despite efforts to re-create the Pub Street of Siem Reap.

This morning we opted for a really, really fun motocycle tour of the countryside.  The first stop was a ride on the very fun Bamboo Train.

 The tracks that were laid by the French in the early 20th Century have gotten quite old, and the years of instability in the region have made rail transport of goods or passengers impractical, but the local people who live near the tracks still make use of the rails with their own created flatbed cars made out of bamboo and wood, and driven by an outboard motor that spins an axle that rolls on the rails.  It was kind of like a kiddie ride at Disneyworld only way, way more fun because it represents something real.  Our local guide also took us to see how they make fish paste, bamboo sticky rice, dried fish, rice whisky, and rice paper where I had the most delicious fried spring roll of my life.

All this from the back of a motorcycle with a pleasantly ill-fitting helmet, a nice young man in front of me driving, and the red earth, green fields, and sleepy river scrolling by.

Now that the G Adventures tour has started, and especially since Kevin is our fabulous fun-loving CEO, I don't know how often I will be able to post. The next blog post will be about my return to the Temples of Angkor.

As always, thanks for reading!

Leslie