January 1, 2008
Battambang: Country roads
Battambang is more provincial than Siem Reap. Siem Reap is flooded with tourists from all over the world and has learned to accommodate their needs. Because of the lovely boat ride, praised in Lonely Planet and other widely read travel guides, a hand full of tourists trickles through Battambang, but there isn't terribly much to see or do in town. (The boat trip, by the way, was not on a tourist boat but the official public line.) Further out in the country there are a few ruinous temples of the same era but not to be compared with the magnificent sites in Angkor. However, they are very peaceful and have much atmosphere to compensate.
This time of year and particularly week-ends are popular for weddings and we witness many of the typical canopies which are set up along the street with rows of tables laid out for large wedding parties. Food and drink are certainly important, but the most obvious attraction is the music: it starts at 5 a.m. on Saturday and is blared from loudspeakers all day and half the night. The volume is deafening. Since this is a two-day affair, it starts up again at 5 a.m. on Sunday. One celebration is taking place next to our hotel. When I wake up to the wedding music at 5 a.m., I have to laugh at the thought of all hotel guests now simultaneously sitting bolt upright in their beds.
We have purchased "Around Battambang", a very informative book written by Ray Zepp, an educator who spent eight years in Battambang. With this in hand we have an interesting day visiting the temples in town, all I believe built after 1930. We are now enabled to identify many of the stories from the life of the Buddha depicted on the temple walls.
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On Monday we ride out to the temple ruins of Ek Phnom to the north of town. We take the winding river road which gives us plenty of scenes of country life: oxen pulling carts full of rice straw, rice paper being baked on a hot iron slab and dried in the sun, and the usual housekeeping activities of cooking, washing, sweeping. There are no tourist buses at Ek Phnom - just two other visitors climbing around on the piles of stones - a pleasant place to spend some time.
Tuesday I wake up with sore throat and my nose is dripping like a water faucet. I can't believe it, another cold! I figure it will go away faster if I rest so I let Janos take off by himself for the planned outing to the south of Battambang.
How to amuse myself? Internet here is painfully slow, no fun there (also a reason for our slow updates here).
But how about a visit to the hairdresser's? But why here in Battambang, not exactly a fashion metropolis. I'm not even sure if they will know how to do a short hair style. All girls and women here have long hair except nuns and very old women in the country who shave their heads. But I am tired of my hair clinging to my skull like a wet mop, and so after some procrastinating I am off to the hairdresser's.
I go into the first shop I recognize as such and with two fingers easily get my point across. We leaf through some magazines and point to different models. I get the impression my hairdresser wants to do one of those wild spiky do's worn by young modern Asians.
It all goes very quickly and I'm relieved of a lot of hair. Now comes the washing. First my head and shoulders get a thorough massage. Then repeatedly the girl washing my hair rakes her fingernails across my scalp as if she were twanging and plucking the strings of a guitar. I'm sure some therapeutic effect is intended but I imagine red welts rising and the cold rinse afterwards is soothing. All this for a total of 3 US$. The cut by the way isn't bad.
By Wednesday I'm feeling better and we take our last jaunt in the outskirts of Battambang, this time to the east with Wat Bassaet as our goal. The days are much cooler now and I need an extra shirt in the chill morning air. It's an unaccustomed 21 degrees centigrade. The road out has some of the most enormous ruts I have ever seen. Obviously these giant ridges in the road originate in the wet season when the surface is deep mud and eventually dries formed by the last vehicles that went through.
Wat Bassaet, an old temple, pre-Angkorian, is now a pile of stones. After 1,000 years the major damage was not done by time and the elements but by the Khmer Rouge who wanted to use the stones to build a dam.
On the way home we circle around to the south on an another route of narrower country lanes, shady and pleasant, that follow a river and rivulets. With his GPS Janos does a good job finding the way on the many intersecting small roads. The last few kilometers are on the National Highway 5, well paved and giving us a foretaste of what we will be traveling on tomorrow.
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