Taking a breather from TEFL teaching: Battambang!

Our TEFL interns make the most of a long weekend with a trip to beautiful rural Battambang for a tour of the bamboo railway and bat caves!

Our schools were closed for the Water Festival for a week so we decided it was time to head over to the famous Siem Reap, the home of Angkor Wat. We had already visited here previously on our SE Asia trip so we didn’t visit the temple again as its quite pricey. We used this time to take a breather from teaching and stay at a secluded hotel with a pool whilst everyone else toured Angkor Wat. That’s one of the great things you’ll find out here, it’s very cheap! You can find four star hotels for $15 a night if you do your research on accommodation websites. We both feel it’s good to give yourself a break from being a ‘budget backpacker’ sometimes and look back at your experiences and breathe in the luxury of hot showers and a pool. Siem Reap is very touristy as it attracts people from all over the world for Angkor Wat and so the tourists are condensed in a relatively small area – most can be found on Pub Street to let off some steam and to rehydrate after a day in the scorching heat exploring the many temples.

After a few days we all got a three-hour bus to Battambang, west of Siem Reap. We all had not a clue what to expect and had trusted the recommendations of friends in Phnom Penh and we had heard a couple of reviews from fellow travellers we’d met so we gave it a shot. It has a sleepy town feel to it with interesting colonial buildings which gave the town a European atmosphere with Battambang evidently having had a huge French influence. The local people were incredibly warm and welcoming (of course, this is Cambodia) and offered directions when we took a few wrong turns whilst cycling around. We all visited a Bamboo train which was a great laugh – the train has been running for over 60 years and was initially used to move supplies around the villages but is now used for tourists. The ‘train’ was actually a man navigating a bamboo slack with a motor probably off a motorbike and when trains were approaching from the opposite direction on the only track, we all simply got off and the man dissembled the clearly fragile framework and then we reassembled and headed at break neck speed for about 5 miles through the rice fields.

The bat caves were our last stop here, and they didn’t disappoint. An incredible sight where we saw millions of bats fly out during sunset for forty minutes straight. We would highly recommend Battambang. A small town that is overlooked by most tourists but with plenty to offer and surrounding places to visit.