A Short Stop in Battambang
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5 July 2010 No Comment

On the bus to Battambang I met K.C., a Korean guy. We decided to share a room together to split the costs. The minute we stepped into the hotel lobby, we got harassed by a tuk tuk driver to do a tour with him. The price was reasonable, so we gave in and hopped in. Our first stop was the famous bamboo train, which runs on some old rails, which are in mint condition, or as the American would say: “Needs little work”. The bamboo train is a self made construction of two (loose) axles, a small bamboo platform on top (not in any way fixed to the axles, just put on top) and a small engine. The platform isn’t fixed on the axles, because the use these “trains” in both directions, so whenever you have coming someone else in your direction, someone has to dismount his “train” and get off the rails. They do this in less than 30 seconds! Anyway, it was quiet the experience, as they go really fast with these things and you’re sitting just right above the ground and well, the rails…

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After the bamboo train he brought us to some temple located on a small hill. None of us was very eager to climb the long way of stairs in the heat, as we both had enough of temples after Angkor, but we paid for it, so we had to do it… ;)

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It was a small temple, for itself not too bad, but right after Angkor… The view of the flat countryside wasn’t too bad either. We took a few pictures and then rushed down the stairs again.

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Off to the next temple, which again was on a small hill. This time we decided to take a motorbike, as we didn’t want to climb any more stairs. On the way to the top we were able to visit some killing caves, where lot’s of people were killed in Cambodia’s bad past (not so long ago!). We couldn’t really go into the cave, as we didn’t bring any torches, but there was a big open cave in the beginning, which had some skulls and bones in a display.

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On the top there was a neat little temple, some monkeys and a good view.

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Yes, he looks very peaceful, but one minute after I took this picture and tried to walk around the temple, he jumped down and attacked me, as I apparently came to close to one of his girlfriends with her baby. He tried to bite me and managed to scratch my leg, so that I was bleeding a little bit, before I was able to fight him off (walk away). At this point I was just glad that I got my rabies shot (against my mothers advice) before I left on this trip!

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A bit later we saw the female monkey with the baby in one of the trees. (btw: does anyone know the name of that tree? It’s all over South East Asia.)

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It was already dark when we got back to the hotel and unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to visit everything that the tuk tuk driver wanted to show us. Apparently there was an old Pepsi factory nearby that he wanted to show us, but they already closed it. He offered to show it to us on the next day for free, but K.C. and I decided that we had seen enough of Battambang (there are no more sights besides the two temples and the bamboo train, the city itself is ugly) and booked a bus ticket to Siem Reap on the next day.

 

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