Day 48-49
Trip Start
May 28, 2006
1
39
67
Trip End
Nov 06, 2006
Batdambang, Cambodia
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Early morning rise and a short bus trip to the river found us surrounded my Cambodian girls desperate to sell us cheese sandwiches. Where ever we walked they would walk in front of you. Not the best thing to do when a bunch of sleep heads just want to get their bags and get on the boat. Boat... more like a canoe! The first hour found us crossing the huge lake and this "canoe" had a large bow wave which had a knack of spraying back at us. Lucky old me was the last on the boat so I had to sit in the front and shield everyone else from it. Then the driver decided to take a short cut through a cut out path through the trees and bushes which was only a foot deep. Needless to say we ran aground on numerous times. After a good hour of slowly inching our way forwards we got luck with deeper water and we were off again at speed. Arrived at Batbambang around 14:30 and luckily we found the best hotel in town. It had a roof restaurant up top and after a nice long shower, we all headed up for a bite to eat and to watch the rain storm come over the town. Later on I headed down to the night market then met the rest of the boat crew back at the roof top for a few drinks.
Sorry I'was prerty tired when I wrote the above - just a bunch of waffle...
Day 49:
Left early in the morning and went on the motorbike tour. I had my own bike and the guide had his. It was great. We went through the surrounding country side seeing loads of rice paddy fields and I learnt lots about the growing of rice. Like did you know that fresh water crabs live in the paddies, and that the farmers using baskets sift through the fields and catch them. They then later use the crabs as bate for fishing. They also grid up the grabs with chilli and then place the mixture in bamboos for catching eels. Now the chilli apparently makes the eels call for help which in turn attracts more eels... pure genius!
Anyways, we went to a couple of nearby mountains which we climbed up to the top by foot to see the killing caves and a really old temple - a minuture and older version of Angkor Wat. Then we saw the fruit bats, a local fruit farm and lastly the infamous bamboo train.
All in all a fantastic day trip after which I was left pretty exhausted.
