Battanbang's bamboo railway train. Adventure #1. Seduced by the tour brochures, I thought
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| Out of the way cow! This is the 'Bamboo Railway'.... |
that I should try this one. Normally one who is quite sceptical about tours from hotels and sees them
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| Temple on a rock.... |
as a chance for the entrepreneurs to grab a few more dollars from my childrens' inheritance! Put this one down as a three out of ten..... Met the tuk-tuk man at 9.15am outside 'The Asia Hotel' and proceeded 8 kms south of the Battmanbang town aboard his 'little' tuk-tuk, as in tuk-tuk towed by a 100cc moped devoid of a suspension system. The bamboo railway turned out to be individual trolleys powered along a straight line, rickety set of single rails for about 4 or 5 kms. When the slow moving up traffic powered by a noisy, smelly gas powered lawn mower engine meets same clanking down the track, somethings got to give! In the case of the bamboo train, one train/trolley is manually lifted off the track for the other one to pass ----and then laboriously placed back onto axles and track. Fun the first couple of times, kind of monotonous the sixth time.
The far end of the line consisted of a huddle of miserable shacks selling very jaded souvenirs while an increasing number of tourists piled into the dead-end station awaiting the physical lifting and turning around of
all the trolley trains (the trolleys can only operate with the engine at the rear). Some of my fellow tourist passengers volubly less than happy about their $5 US ride (expensive by Cambodian standards), but hey---welcome to the third world! Note: not sure if it is politically correct these days to refer to other non-western areas as being third world--my apologies to all, if I have been insensitive!!
Adventure #2. Two adventures in a single day may be too much for this senior! 3.00pm picked up again by my loyal & trusty tuk-tuk man---doesn't he have any other customers, or is it that I am being overcharged? 14 kms along very potholed major roads to arrive at the "temple & mountain tour". I score this one at 15 out of 10!! Disappointment this morning, MORE than made up for by this afternoon's expedition. Weather: perfect--sunny, dry & a little less humid. This place hosts an absolute classical Cambodian Buddhist temple atop a very high rocky hill. One cannot imagine a setting that more perfectly encapsulates the post-card image of
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| 20,000 executed at this temple....(re-enactment) |
mysterious & sublime Cambodia. But wait--this temple holds very dark (& recent) secrets. During the genocidal purges by the Khmer Rouge army in the period 1975-79, 20,000 citizens of Battambang, men, women children & babies, were shepherded to the temple at the summit and chopped up, hung, boiled alive etc etc., and then hurled many metres down into the caves of which there are many. The whole place is now a rather raucous museum---local people sit on the memorial stones, laugh sing & play pop music-- go figure.
The actual temple, clad in gold, complete with saffron gowned monks and with monkeys clambering all over, offers an unforgettable view of hundred of square kilometres of rice paddies and distant purple mountains in the late afternoon summer sun. I trust that my blog photos do some small justice to the temple mountain at Battambang. Definitely include this as a 'must see' place in S.E.Asia.
But wait---more to come. Descended the vertiginous narrow road on the back seat of my motor cycle taxi-man. Just time for a cold (soft)
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| Millions of fruit bats leave the caves exactly at sun-down..... |
drink and as it's nearly dark, a 100 million, no, I lie---500 million bats emerge miraculously in an unending stream, from the caves in the rock face, precisely as the sun hits the horizon. Amazing--only spoilt by the loud techno rock belted out on loud speakers by the restaurant owners. Wouldn't it have been so much better to have heard only the screams of these swooping, diving, rolling, flying mice. Truly an unforgettable experience.
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