Battam-BANG!

We’ve been telling that joke for a while.

Too bad it came a little too close to true…

But I’ll start at the beginning: A few friends and I took a trip up to the north west part of Cambodia, to the provincial city in Battambang. A friend of a friend lives and works up there, and it was as good of an excuse as any to get out of town for the weekend.

The long night bus dumped us at our destination at about 10 in the morning, and after settling into a hotel and grabbing some food, we began our adventures. First up, temples!

This one, Wat Ek Phnom, is actually the first temple I’ve visited in Cambodia. It’s beautiful, set about 18km outside Battambang city, and very peaceful. We rented our first motos, and hit the smooth road there and back. It was a lovely first taste of motorcycle travel, and I can see why people really love seeing the world that way.

The road out to the bamboo train was a little rougher–and when I say a little, I mean, it was kinda scary–but we made it out there in time to catch the sunset as we clanked along on the old train tracks.

The next day we went out to Kamping Puoy reservoir, which was formed when the Khmer Rouge built a damn using the forced labor of thousands of Cambodians.

It’s a gorgeous place, still and serene, if you can forget its history. We weren’t able to figure out if the houses flooded up to their roofs had been there since the lake formed, since they seemed to be in too good shape to have been drowned for so many years.

Our boat driver tied our boat up next to one of those houses and helped us climb up the tree and jump off into the lake.

We left the lake and climbed up Phnom Sampov on our motos, where there’s a temple and some killing caves (yes, that). This is where things got a bit hairy–I managed to scrape up my leg when the path up the hill got the best of me and the bike went over (damn, those things are heavy)–and I stopped taking photos. The view was great (and we got yet another spectacular Cambodian sunset), but I was truthfully more interested in getting back to the city to clean myself up.

A really fun weekend, with admittedly a little too much adventure.