Battambang Province

Today I took an excursion to some of the sights around Battambang, but the thrill was traveling on these bumpy dirt roads through pretty rural area where I was the only tourist that was there for most of the journey. We drove past rice fields where the harvest was already taking place, since the wet season just ended last week, I believe. We passed a lot of palm trees and various kinds of fruit trees on both sides of the road.

About 15 km southwest of Battambang is a mountain, Phnom Sampeau (more of a hill, really), made of limestone. About halfway up the hillside was an old temple, which seemed pretty peaceful and quiet in the hazy morning. But, further in from the temple gates were a couple of ominous-looking caves where the outsides of the entrance had been scrawled over in Khmer writing and arrows. The Khmer Rouge used the caves as mass graves for people that the executed near the mouths of the caves. In one of the caves was a 20-m-long statue of a reclining Buddha. Along another wall perpendicular to the Buddha, a memorial stood with windows where you could look onto the skulls and bones of people whose bodies were found in the caves. Symbols of peace and devastation in such close proximity to each other were unsettling to say the least, as if my mind couldn't make sense of what my eyes were seeing.

The hike up to the top of the hill was hot, but I got to watch my child guide point out a green snake and catch the biggest lizard I've seen so far on this trip. The temple at the top of the mountain was beautiful, especially the murals surrounding the Buddha in the interior of the temple. The style of the paintings reminded me of what I had seen in Hindu illustrations and prayer books.

Another 10 km to the east of the mountain was the departure point for the bamboo train. Let me explain what the train looks like. A 12'x5' pallet of bamboo is mounted onto a pair of wheels that fit onto the train tracks. A motor is attached to the pallet, and this provides the energy for acceleration of the train. The train that we were on was a hundred years old, according to my tour guide. Watching the fields and vegetation race by at 20 km/h while bracing myself for the large bumps that happened whenever we passed over an uneven part of the track was pretty exciting. Sitting directly on the pallet and having no walls or windows to separate me from being outside made the speed of the train seem really fast. The 10-minute ride reminded me of a safer roller coaster, as long as I kept holding onto the rail.