Road Trip to Battambang 5th to the 8th

Road Trip to Battambang 5th to the 8th January

Monday the 3rd
Random Holiday day

Take the bike up to Vay’s bike shop for a pre road trip service.
Unfortunately Vay is not there yet and his assistant speaks no English, my K’mai is not up to explaining what I want doing with the bike so I decide to head to the office and drop it off there later.

Arriving at the Ministry I find it virtually disserted, Kanika appears after a few minutes and explains that it is a bank holiday, so I check my Email, go out for breakfast, kill some time and head back to Vay’s.

Leaving the bike with him, I head home for the day; returning back to is shop at 16:00 to collect a fully serviced bike, including; new speedo cable, new clutch cable, oil change, brake fluid, air filter, et cetera for the princely sum of US$20 all in.

The bike is running like a dream.


Wednesday the 5th
The Road Trip to Battambang starts.

National Highway 5 from Phnom Penh to BB around 300 kilometres – which will either mean everything or will mean nothing to the reader, depending on whether or not they have ever seen/been on a Khmer road or not…

Battambang is Cambodia’s second largest city, bisected by the Stung Sangker River. It is actually a quiet, sleepy, little town that is pretty much closed by 9 o’clock at night. A welcome change to Phnom Penh for a few days.

07:00 up and at ‘em tiger.

08:30 after some initial flitting around PP – petrol, mineral water, picking up some things to deliver to people in BB – the bike, my friends and I are heading North out of the city

10:00 clear of all of PP’s outskirts and a few miles of countryside you come across the first town on the road, the town of Prey Khmer. A reasonable point at which I felt it appropriate to stop for a spot of breakfast and some much needed coffee – the dust from the road was already making my throat dry and my eyes water.

10:30 full of rice, bacon and iced coffee I head back on the road, clearing this tiny pit-stop of a town before I reach 3rd gear.

The next couple of hours see a fairly straight road with the minimal amount of death-trap potholes, loose gravel, mudslides, random animals crossing the road – cows, goats, water buffalo, ducks, et al.

The next city that one comes across on NH5 is Kompong Chhnang.
I am tempted to stop, at the very least for a coffee, as I have a couple of friends that live in KC, but I know that if I meet up with them that it will turn into a few hours and then I run the risk of not getting to BB before sunset - no street or road lights out here – so I press on, making a silent promise to myself to pay them a proper visit in the near future, on one of the upcoming bank holidays perhaps.

The road between KC and Pursat becomes somewhat treacherous; it narrows to just the width of two cars, has major potholes [some big enough to lose a water buffalo in] gravel, sand, et cetera. the going gets slow as I weave between the hazards slowly, trying to keep an eye on the road, the cars overtaking, stray animals…

Fortunately, the city of Pursat eventually comes up, and the road returns to one of solid tarmac and widens to a reasonable width for a major traffic artery.

Bordered on either side by rice paddies and fish ponds the road is raised around 20 to 25 feet above the land, creating an elevated feeling that can make one a little nervous while being overtaken by a speeding car.


15:30 arrive at Battambang, aching and somewhat tired

Check into the Chhaya Hotel – fan room US$5 a night.

17:00 an early dinner [late lunch?] at the Neak Poan restaurant overlooking the river, a more than acceptable plate of fried egg noodles with beef and broccoli.

During the course of the day I have also learnt a new K’mai phrase ‘Khew Koot’ which means sore arse.

Thursday the 6th
Breakfasting at a Khmer corner restaurant – The White Rose - I am surprised to find Western food items on the menu, feeling somewhat daring I order the omelette and toast. To say that it was disappointing was somewhat of an understatement…

Breakfats over with it is time to start playing tourist, first stop:

Phnom Sampeau
18 Km from BB town along an averagely bad road.

This hilltop temple has a long and hot climb to the temple and stupa at the top – nearly 2,000 steps in all.

Parking the bike in one of the many restaurants at the bottom I run the gauntlet of restaurant owners, beggars, ‘tour guides’ et cetera. Saying no, no and no to all of them, a couple of teenage boys start to follow us up the road anyway telling me about the history of the place, what the hills are on the horizon, that sort of thing.
About half way up we stop at a strategically place wooden shack selling cold water, fresh coconuts and snacks.

Reaching the Chinese temple about 75% of the way up we go in to pay our respects to Heng’s mum who is a nun at this particular pagoda – lots of bowing and being polite.

After which we head around the back of the Chinese temple and over to the Killing Caves, a small platform with skulls and bones, we walk through the caves in which the monks have placed several small shrines and statutes to these victims of Pol Pot’s insanity.

Exiting back to the main shrine at the entrance, where they are in the middle of building another small pagoda, one of the ‘tour guide boys’ explains that they are raising the money to do this through donations from visitors and tourists – surprise, surprise – so the monk explains that for a US$10 donation I can have my name put on one of the benches outside the pagoda in the gardens. After a little hesitation I hand over the money and the monk duely records my details in a book and one of his brothers comes over and starts painting my name onto the pink marble garden bench straight away !

Leaving them to there calligraphy, we wander back up to the Chinese temple where the nuns have prepared a simple luncheon for us – rice and roast chicken with fish broth – I guess that it helps to be travelling with Khmer friends who have relatives who are nun’s :-)

After a quiet hour eating rice and looking out over the miles and miles of flat rice plains, it is time for us to make the final ascent to the top.

Wat Phnom Sampeau is a lot smaller than you think when you finally get there and currently under a fair amount of restoration, but is typical of the architecture one would expect of a Khmer temple, every wall and ceiling painted in bright and vivid colours depicting scenes from Buddha’s life, gold coloured statues of him, fresh lotus flowers everywhere, monks in saffron and orange silk robes milling about.

You know, the usual !

From here you have a commanding view of the province, Phnom Sampeau being the highest thing for miles and miles around. You can see villages, roads, rivers, reservoirs and of course the obligatory mile after mile of rice paddies.


Phnom Mon - Chicken Hill ???
A baby climb up to the summit after Phnom Sampeau, less than a hundred steps !

Atop, surrounding the modestly sized shrine are statues of a woman fighting and killing tigers, my friends attempt to explain the legend behind ‘the woman who kills tigers’ but our joint linguistic skills can not find enough common words to get it all across.


Kamping Poy
Mile, after mile, after mile of the roughest dirt track, pothole laden, ploughed field of a road I have ever seen to get out here to this 8km long dam and recreational lake.

Hand built by conscripts to the Khmer Rouge some 10,000 Khmers died during its construction. Nowadays it serves as a tourist attraction and picnic spot.

Upon arrival we were greeted by hordes of children and old women, both groups of which were deeply intent on selling us fruit and/or boat trips around the reservoir. Settling for just some fruit – and a fresh green coconut to drink, we sit on a bench and just watch the water for a while.

Enough playing tourist for one day, back to BB for a spot of dinner at the recently opened KK Restaurant on street 2 ½ ?

I decide to risk the cheeseburger and fries and am very pleasantly surprised by the quality of this homemade peppered burger.
Midway through dining I am joined by a friend of mine, Dickon, who lives in Battambang, and we enjoy a couple of tall bottles of Angkor Beer, while chatting about mutual friends as well as him recommending places to visit/things to see while in BB.
By a strange coincidence, he is going down to Phnom Penh the following day.


Friday the 7th

The Sun Rise Café, a somewhat feeble attempt at an English breakfast in this ex-pat restaurant/coffee bar.

What made it all the more bizarre was the table of 20 or so evangelical American god botherers all standing at the beginning of their meal to pray out loud for the food and the salvation of the godless heathens of Cambodia. A cynical translation of their aims could be summed up thus:

- yes we are here to help,
- we will feed the hungry [if they come to our church service first]
- we will buy your naked children clothes [if they attend our Sunday School]
- we will teach English to you all in our school [ but the only lessons will actually be bible studies]

Now, I have nothing against missionaries per se, but when they are here in disguise, pretending to be another Aid Charity, it just seems somewhat underhanded and smacks of religious colonialism.

After this slightly odd start to the day, the only thing on our tourist agenda is a trip to:

Wat Ek Phnom
The somewhat disappointing ruins of an 11th Century Angkorian temple built during the rein of Suryavarman the First.
Having visited quite a number of Angkorian temples since arriving in Cambodia I have to say that this was the most disappointing one.
Paying a dollar for admission to the tourist police was just adding insult to injury.

Entry into the Angkorian temple of Ta Prohm near the Tonle Bati and Wat Nokor in Kompong Cham province was free and they are in much better condition than this one. Still, what the hell is a dollar.

We head back the scenic route, doubling around to NH5 and re-entering the town by the main road. Am supposed to be meeting my friends family for lunch, but we arrived too late and they had already eaten. So we head off to a small Khmer restaurant for rice.

P’sar Nat
The local market. Usual bits and pieces; odd looking fruits and western clothing.

Followed by iced coffee, Khmer ‘cakes’ and general wandering about the town.
[do not ask about the Khmer cakes, urrrkk]


Saturday the 8th

08:00
Breakfast, rice pork and iced coffee, and fare-thee-well to BB

09:00
Head out on the highway, looking for adventure…

Route and ride back to PP pretty much the same as the journey up.
The only real difference was that on the way back I had a much more spectacular view of Phnom Udong on the horizon, several miles of flat rice paddies in the foreground and a clear blue day.
Phnom Udong [The Victorious in K’mai] was the capital of Cambodia back in the 1600’s and as it was partially backlit by the setting sun it looked very impressive, all ‘dawn of time’ type stuff.

Pressing on for the last few miles back to Phnom Penh I decide that I will have to make the pilgrimage out to Phnom Udong at some point soon.