Tour by TukTuk

This morning we were picked up at 10am by the tuktuk driver who dropped us off at the hostel yesterday.  We had a full day tour arranged to see some sights around Battembang.

On the way to the first stop we went past a roundabout with a huge statue of a man with a black stick that was apparently magic and helped defeat his enemies. He later become king apparently. Our first stop was at the Bamboo train. Exactly as it sounds, it is little bamboo carts on a train track that you can ride up and down. It was a single track line so if you met any carts coming the other way you had to hop off and the driver would disassemble the cart and put it to the side while the other went past, before reassembling and getting back on. It was pretty cool. The carts went quite fast. We went one way and then back again ten minutes later.

Next we drove out to a rickety bridge across a river to take some photos. On the way the driver, Han, was pointing out all the different fruits growing in the fields. We saw mangoes, pineapples, bananas, coconuts, chillies and lemongrass  (not technically fruits). We also saw peanuts. We stopped and he showed us them by digging a couple out from the soil. I never really realised peanuts grew underground. We also looked at a pagoda and then drove a couple of metres to a Muslim fishing village.  It had a mosque; I'm not sure if that was the only thing that made it Muslim or if exclusively Muslims lived there but that's what Han called it.

Next we drove and stopped next to an empty market. I was a bit confused as to why we had stopped and then Han pointed at the tree. Hanging in the tree were loads of huge fruit bats, hanging upside down with their wings fluttering. It was a bit strange as you expect bats to be hidden away in a cave, not hanging off a tree in broad daylight.

Our next stop was lunch and an old pagoda. We had loads of time at this stop as we had to get the timings right for another place. We had lunch first at a little pop up restaurant at the bottom of the pagoda. The food was actually really nice. We sat around for a while, summoning up the strength to visit the pagoda. We had to climb 358 steps (I counted) in the 35° heat to reach the pagoda ruins. It was hard work. We had a look round the ruins and then headed back down the steps for a drink. We left around 2:45pm-ish.

Our final stop was at some caves. We got motorbikes around the points of interest as it was a long way to walk, we would have died in the heat and we're lazy. The first point of interest was at a temple and the killing caves, where the Khmer Rouge used to throw people down into caves to their deaths. There was a little temple in the cave band a huge sleeping Buddha statue. The temple has a sort of shrine filled with skulls of some of the killing cave victims. There was also a very dark cave area behind the temple bit with some bats in.

The second point of interest was at Pkarslaw cave,  which was less of a cave and also had a temple in it. It was here we first saw the monkeys. They were just hanging around. We saw a mother and her baby and got pretty close to them to take photos. 

The third point of interest was the top of the hill and a third temple,  not in a cave. There was amazing views over the very flat landscape from the top and the temple was pretty nice. There was also a whole load more monkeys, some eating coconuts, some eating ice cream.

After these places we went back down to sit at the bottom of the hill under an entrance to a cave. At around quarter at 6, hundreds upon hundreds of small bays started flying out the cave and off into the distance in one long stream. We sat and watched for a solid 20 minutes while bats flew out and they were still going when we left. It was remarkable. They were a lot smaller than the fruit bats we had seen earlier. It was quite a sight. We then got the tuktuk back to the hostel after a very enjoyable day. We had some food and then called it a day.