The Big Meander

Or alternatively………”If you were cool ~ you’d be Battambang”. This small city in Northern Cambodia is just big enough to be comfortable for Westerners and just small enough to support artisans practicing their livelihood for local and tourist alike.

The backroads were full of farmers making their living growing and harvesting Thai chilis, corn, potatoes, etc. Our guide, Mr. Houn did a good job of not showing his surprise when I wanted to stop the car to watch a machine harvesting rice. The harvester was much smaller than the ones we use in the U.S. for harvesting our grains, and reminded me of the four row harvesters we used at the Rohm & Haas wheat research company back in the day.

I’m starting to love rice in all its presentations, but one of the most interesting was the sticky rice toasted in bamboo with coconut milk and beans sold by the side of the road. The families start the process in the middle of the night to have the bamboo containers ready for consumption first thing ~ so good. I also found a “dessert soup” with banana, coconut milk, and tapioca that was really not very attractive to look at but also so good. You can serve any of these dishes and/or mango sticky rice when you have us over for dinner anytime!

We stopped at what seemed like a random house in a small village with clay pots drying outside and watched a woman take a lump of prepped clay to an almost finished pot in under 5 minutes. There were about 200 pots drying and waiting for the next stage of production ~ each of them handmade and very nearly identical to the one next to it. I couldn’t tell if she was amused or bemused as I asked questions like; “where do you get the clay”, and “how many do you make”, and “who do you sell them to” through our guide. As we drove down the road we noticed several small piles of these same pots outside of homes ~ one way of supplementing income between harvests for these farmers.

The world famous (?) bamboo train has to be experienced to be believed…….hurtling down train tracks on a bamboo platform with no guardrails over rickety bridges in the middle of the Cambodian countryside is exhilarating. The only thing that would have made it better was a beer….and lo and behold there was someone willing to sell us one on the way back.

Unfortunately, everywhere you go in Cambodia there is a Khmer Rouge outpost and/or execution site. In this case it was the killing caves of Phnom Sampeau, a mountaintop with a deconsecrated temple. The mountain is inhabited by monkeys, dotted with caves and comes complete with old Russian gun emplacements. The sunset from the top of the hill was beautiful, but once again ghosts walked beside us.

I wouldn’t say we saw “wildlife”, but the hill is full of caves and so is the habitat for about a million bats. After watching the sunset we went to the foot of the hill and witnessed those bats leave the caves en masse headed for the insects of Tonle Sap Lake. I wouldn’t have thought that would be cool ~ but it absolutely was!

So….would we live here? Still no ~ still too hot generally. Would we visit again? Probably not cause there are other things to see in Cambodia….but it IS a cool place.