Battambang: Better Than You'd Expect

We just got back from a lovely weekend in Battambang, Cambodia's second-largest city, located about 4-5 hours west of Phnom Penh. We travelled with our friends the Garveys, and thoroughly enjoyed our long weekend (thank you International Women's Day!) seeing a city most expat residents--and probably 99% of tourists--pass up.

First stop was a memorable tour of the floating village of Kampong Loung, in Pursat province on the way to Battambang. For the kids, the adventure started when Daddy brought home some life jackets. (We knew the chances of the boats having kid-sized life jackets were zero, so figured we better bring our own.) Conjuring up memories of the Christmas they got bike helmets, they loved the jackets, didn't want to be separated from them and had to be convinced not to sleep wearing them. Of course, wearing the jackets on an actual boat was even cooler.



The floating village itself was really cool. I've been to the floating village in Siem Reap (near Angkor Wat--which I hear now charges a $20 admission fee!) before, but this one was neater. It was a whole little town laid out in a grid--complete with a gas station, police station, karaoke bars, restaurants, and mobile phone shops.

If you want to get around, you gotta paddle...

Check out the "streets"! And if you look closely at the building on the left, you can see they even have potted plants. This is one established place.

A vegetable seller navigates down past a Christian church. That took us by surprise--maybe it's Catholic since the community here is largely ethnic Vietnamese?

Here's a floating restaurant. You can see her thermoses of tea and hot water and other drinks, and I bet she's got some food under those cloths. Your lunch comes to you!

We took a lunch break at a floating restaurant and snapped a pic of all the kids in their way cool life jackets. L to R: Declan (20 months), Ellie (4 1/2), Kieran (3 1/2), Ben (3).

We got a promising start the next day with an absolutely fabulous sunrise we could see from our veranda.

Then we climbed up to see Phnom Banan, some Angkor-era ruins a little ways outside Battambang.

Too cute! Here are all the kids taking a rest from the hike up to the ruins. L to R: Ben, Kieran, Declan, Ellie. (Of course, I don't know why Ben's tired...he was not excited about walking so Nathan and I had to carry him most of the way...)


Here we are in front of one of five prasats, or big temple thingies.

That afternoon, we capped off our adventure with a way cool and utterly unique Battambang experience: riding on the bamboo train. There used to be commercial train service out around Battambang in the 1920s and 30s under French colonial rule, but as the French left and the rails degraded, the commercial service stopped. Those ingenious Khmers figured out a great way to still use the existing rails. They developed bamboo trains--really just bamboo platforms powered by a motorcycle engine and rested on top of military tank axles. They're so simple as to be brilliant. We took a ride on the bamboo train, which at top speeds of 20 or 30 mph and over wavy railroad tracks felt a bit like a flat rollercoaster through the rice fields connecting villages outside Battambang.

Here you can get a good glimpse of the Garveys (mom Stephanie, dad Liam, and kids Kieran and Declan) as they sit on the bamboo train with Nathan, Ben, and Ellie.

And here's what happens if you meet a train going the other way: The train with the lightest load (in this case us, since the other train had two motorcycles) gets taken off the tracks and put back on. Similarly, to turn around, you just pick up the bamboo platform, turn it around, swap the axles, and go the other way.


It was a great weekend and we're delighted that we got to see a little bit more of Cambodia before we leave in a few months...and happy to have had so much fun without shelling out for pricey plane tickets for the whole family.