Having conquered Angkor, it was time to depart lovely Siem Reap and move onto other pastures. First on the list is Battambang. Aside from being delightfully fun to say, it’s the second largest city in Cambodia after Phnom Penh, and supposedly boasts the best French colonial architecture in Cambodia. It’s also sort of in between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, so it seemed like a natural place to kill a day or two.

First, breakfast

Cambodia bus companies offer a handy pick up feature. Basically, instead of going to the bus station, the bus companies will pick up customers from their hotels and bring them to the bus station. Hey, free transportation, what’s not to like? Except there is only one bus picking up all the customers. It’s not a brigade of tuk tuks going around the city bringing everyone to the same station. It’s one bus going hotel to hotel until everyone is on the bus, and then driving to the bus station to transfer everyone to… another bus.

By the time the pick up bus reached our hotel, half of the bus was already full. Even so, it still took about another hour for the pick up bus to grab everyone else and arrive at the bus station. Siem Reap isn’t exactly known for its wide boulevards. In many cases, the pick up bus had to drive down the street to the hotel, pick up a guest, and the reverse all the way back down the street until it arrived at an intersection. Convenient, I suppose. Efficient, hardly not.

Three hours later, we reached Battambang (above). Despite being a larger city, it had a very sleepy feel. The locals-to-tourists ratio was much more in favor of locals (unlike Siem Reap), and the tourist hustle and bustle no longer dictated the city’s activities. A very nice tuk tuk driver drove us to our hostel, which Cindy had found for an impressive $9 a night. Of course, we learned that $9 buys a third floor room with no windows, no air conditioning, and a bucket shower. Great, time to sweat.

Riverside Battambang

We did a small walk around Battambang before returning to the bar right next to our hostel. We sat at a communal table across from Sara, an expat from Denver currently working in Battambang, and Sabrina, Sara’s friend visiting from Denver. They were planning on visiting another bar nestled over the river and invited us along. We had a few more beers and talked about Sara’s work, Sabrina’s travels (first time out of the country), and our own trip.