We only ended up staying in Battambang one night and one day but while we were there we managed to do so much! The tuk tuk driver who'd met us from the sleeper bus offered to take us out for the day to see and do all the things we'd wanted plus more!
Our first stop was the famous bamboo train, it's not quite how I'd imagined it in my head but it was such good fun, the locals were given use of the old rail lines 7 years back as the track wasn't good enough for commercial use. Everytime you met a bamboo train coming the other way one of them would have to be dismantled and the people clamber into the bushes as the other 'train' passed. No wonder the track wasn't good enough for real trains it was curved like a snake and had huge gaps in the track which made for interesting if not painful jolts (especially if your sat at the front)!
We traveled on it at pretty high speeds for about 20 minutes until we arrived at a little village, the kids immediately jump on you and shower you with gifts as well as trying to sell you bracelets and what not. They also took us to a rice making factory and showed us how different grains were harvested which was cool, as I had no idea before this!
This was a grasshopper they'd made out of banana leafs, awesome!!!
After the bamboo train was the amazing 'suspension bridge' if anyones been to Bristol or seen bigger you can understand why Olly and I thought this one was shit, but we were told how vital it was to the local villages, if anything it was fun to swing on!!
Fruit bats were the next stop, they were HUGE! I'd never seen such big bats and they eat 'fruit' as their name suggests and so are not nocturnal like most bats! Apparently according to our tuk tuk driver ' Mr Excellent' it's not uncommon for the locals to catch them slice there throats and BBQ them up. There is pretty much nothing the Cambodians won't eat.
This was a temple we stopped at and had lunch, there were 376 steps up to the top and it was over 1,000 years old.
After this we hopped on the back of moped and rode up a mountain to get some good views of the Cambodian countryside around Battambang, Cambodia oddly in most of the places we've been to is really flat, especially at Battambang which is one of the best places for growing rice in the country. Due to this there are many more killing fields in the area, as this is where a lot of people where forced to work in the Khmer Rouge regime, we wen't to a killing cave, which as the name suggests is somewhere they would push men, women and children in. They didn't necessarily die on impact either which made it really haunting.
We drove down the mountain and were told if we wait around for a couple of hours millions of bats come out of the caves to feast, so we grabbed a few beers with the German guys we'd met and waited up high on a cliff we'd scaled! They apparently came out at 6 pm on the dot. Having been waiting for a while we were getting impatient. Quite funny really as I thought about David Attenborough and his crew waiting for weeks just to get a shot of a rare animal, and here I am getting ragey 2 hours in. When they finally came it was absolutely wicked, there were literally millions of them, I have some brilliant videos but this is the only half decent photo I managed to get of them swarming in the distance!
Up early tomorrow for a slow boat to Siem Reap.
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