19. One Week in Battambang
12.10.2023
It was with a heavy heart when I left Siem Reap and I am already plotting to come back in a few months probably skipping Laos as hotel prices in general seem to be pretty high especially for what is offered in comparison to Cambodia or Vietnam. The vehicle I travelled in was not a minivan but not a full-fletched coach either, more something in between. Seats were not even half occupied and it was a pleasant 3-3.5hour ride.
I hadn't even left the bus when I already got questioned by a bunch of guys at the door “Taxi? Tuktuk?” I was sure I would make my way through the city by foot to my hotel so I declined, but suddenly someone put a sign in front of my face and it had written on it: Christian Sperling! What the heck? I hadn't informed my hotel how and when I would arrive. I later saw an email that the hotel offered a free pick-up service from the bus station but they obviously had gone out of their way to make sure I was not missing out on their service. The driver told me that this was the only bus today arriving so he took a guess and waited for me. I certainly didn't complain although walking 700m to my hotel wouldn't have been much of a hassle otherwise.
My first impression of the city was: just okay! Less posh and simpler than Siem Reap, less touristy, more like what I think is a typical Cambodian city of medium size.
That impression stayed true until the end of my stay: apart from a lot of restaurants catering for tourists (and that's where you would mainly see them), there was not much else that would indicate that Battambang is trying to be tourism-centered. Not many spas/massage parlours, very few travel agencies and the promenade along the river looked much greener and nicer in the photo from 1991 that was displayed in the foyer of my hotel.
Battambang in 1991 - The big market buildings are on the lower right corner
I did not explore much. The big market was only 100m from my hotel and a Lucky convenience store around 650m away. Over the course of the week I strolled through my area mainly on my quest of finding a true vegetarian/vegan restaurants that were open when I needed them to be open. This was also the biggest bug bear of mine in this city. For the first time I struggled to get a vegan meal. Many of the ones being displayed on google maps as vegetarian restaurant were in fact normal restaurants serving also vegetarian food which I think should be a given anyway nowadays. More irritating, though, was it when the menu showed (vg) written behind the dish name but then the waiter or waitress had no idea what vegan means. It happened that I was advised to not order the “vg” marked dish because it had “many things in it you don't want.” Talking about misleading advertising… . Well, I resorted to “just vegetables and noodles, no egg, please”, and still was turned away in one instance where they could not ensure that the dish would be animal product free. On another day in a different restaurant I was happily served a noodle soup with strips of meat on top of it....after I had chatted about my preferences for almost 5 minutes with the waitress! Very disappointing. A lot of restaurants don't open before 5pm and others already close at 3pm.
Opening hours on google maps proved to be wrong several times which left me wandering through the night more than once scavenging for food… okay, okay - I did’t have to crawl into dumpster in filthy back alleys but it wasn’t as easy as plant-based dining out should be in 2023.
There were also a few rainy days that made it easy for me to focus more on my previous blog posts and to get my website closer to its official launch date which should be sometimes this week.
Of course I couldn’t spend a whole week in a foreign town without doing at least one sight-seeing tour. I opted for a 5.5 hour tuk tuk ride with a very knowledgeable local guy named Bun. At the end I was able to tick the boxes for visiting local villages, temples, having ridden the bamboo train, checking out the killing cave and spectating a natural phenomenon at the so called bat cave (no, this has nothing to do with the DC universe, we are talking real animals here).
Bun spoke excellent English and he dropped a lot of history facts and background info about buildings, statues, infrastructure and culture while guiding us through the outskirts of Battambang.
He also shed light on his own interesting past. My group consisted of two brothers from the UK and a New Zealander living in Melbourne, Australia. What set the tour apart was Bun sometimes stopping at the side of the road, pointing at plants, asking if we knew what it was and then blowing our minds by rubbing leaves that started to smell like lemongrass (because they were lemongrass), seeds that exploded in the palm of a hand within 15seconds after Bun had poured water over it, I learned that dragonfruit grows on cactusses and that scare crows were often used in rural Cambodia at the property entrances to keep Covid-19 out.
Our first longer stop was the bamboo train. What is a bamboo train you ask? – Fair enough! It is the most low-tech train construction you can imagine. 2x two small wheels on a steel axle, a platform made of wood and – you knew it, give yourself a pat on the back – BAMBOO, looking a bit like a flying carpet, that slots losely without any fixings onto the axles and a rubber band around one axle that connects to a little engine operated by the train conductor. We paid $5.00 per person to ride on one of the many bamboo trains along a single railway track for approximately 7km.
Every time a bamboo train with other tourists approached us, both trains stopped and one of them got literally deconstructed. The platform to sit on got lifted up and stored besides the track. Then the wheels with the axles got lifted up and parked besides the track as if it was nothing (I tried to lift one in a haphazardly attempt to not ruin my back and failed miserably. I estimate each axle with two wheels weighs at least 40-50kg). Once the other train was out of the way, our vehicle rolled some metres forward, and sometimes our train conductor helped to put the other train back on the track again before we continued our journey.
After 20min, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, we stopped so a local women in a wonky wooden stall could advertise her bamboo train T-shirts, miscellaneous other souvenirs and drinks while whinging at least 10x that we were her first customer today and that we should support her.
To my amazement, in the middle of our snack-and-merchandise-break a real train passed by...it had only 2 carriages but mighty large in comparison to our make-shift bamboo train. Bun told us later that this was the regional train to Phnom Penh going only once a day and taking several hours longer than the same connection via bus.
After we had returned to our starting point, we transferred from the train back into the tuk tuk and drove to a mountain with a huge buddha statue and larger than life engravings chiseled into/out of a mountain wall. A huge hole next to that impressive artisanal achievement was the entrance to the bat cave where we would witness a remarkable wildlife spectacle later on.
But first things first. We paid $2.00 to be driven up the mountain on the back of a pickup truck to see the killing cave. During the horrendous Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot from 1975-1979 that brought incredible misery with far-reaching consequences to most Cambodians, hundreds of people were brought up the mountain, killed and pushed down cave. Some skeletons are still there up to this day. You first go down a lot of steps before entering the cave. A shrine with bones and statues at the entrance make clear that it is a place of worship and rememberance. At several different locations on the mountain the atrocities that happened decades ago are graphically depicted by painted sculptures. - The cave itself isn't very deep, at least not the part that is accessible. You can't see much at all but what's more important is the chilling emotion you feel when standing in the cave being aware of its unsettling history.
We headed back to the pick up truck and drove to the top of the mountain that had just another temple built on it as well a few other buildings and two cannons from the “Don't ask me which war”-age. The view over the rice fields and villages is sweet and makes for a good photo. Many monkeys have claimed the area that has decayed quite a lot as their home and you see them roaming around balancing on roof tops and swinging from tree to tree.
Dusk was upon us, so we drove all the way back down to watch millions of bats flying out of the bat cave in search for food until their return in the early morning hours. Bun let us know that it takes 30-45minutes for all bats to get out of the cave.
To me, it looked like a never ending stream of swallows, but once I zoomed in on the photographs I took, it was evident I was capturing bats indeed. They are a natural pest control and therefore appreciated by the citizens (besides being one of the biggest tourists attractions in the Battambang area) unlike fruit bats that can decimate farmers orchard harvests.
On our way back to the city we stopped in front of a private school with the comical abbreviation B.A.D. “Something-Something” Primary School. Earlier, Bun had told us a lot about corruption in the Cambodian school system that enhances the divergence between the poor and the rich. Basically, you can buy your grades and better education with money while the less priviledged kids fall off the edge. Therefore, their parents don't see any reason to send them to school in the first place and make them work at home and in the fields. That’s unfair but unfortunately the sad reality. Anyway,…back to our quick stop at the school: the genuine excitement of Asian kids seeing white (and probably black, too) foreigners never gets old! It’s contagious - so naturally we eagerly waved back and returned their “HELLOOO”s.
