Moving on to Battanbang with monasteries and a water blessing and BATS!

 Friday, March 14, 2025

So, it was another one of those nights where we were going to just lie down for a bit and then go exploring down town Siem Reap.  Somehow the siren call of the bed couldn't be ignored and I started blogging yesterday's adventure around two in the morning!

Anyway, we went down to breakfast at seven and finally tried the soup.  You choose your ingredients and the chef does his magic and you receive a bowl of heavenliness!  Delicious and we should have done it the other two days!  Just to be sure we can make it until a late lunch we have some American stuff, too, and I have that tasty coffee with lots of hot water and milk and sugar.

Back upstairs to finish packing and down again to meet Soy at eight.  And we're off to Battanbang. It's a three hour trip and Soy spends much of that time telling us more about his country's amazing history.  I don't know how students learn all of it!  (I will try to find time to recall some of what I learned here.)

Who knew they had a ferris wheel?

We pass so many amazing monasteries and temples!  At one point there are several carts along the side of the road and Soy selects the one with the prettiest lady!  He buys several bamboo tubes and shows us how to peel down the sides to reveal Bamboo Sticky Rice.  It's made with sticky rice, coconut milk, black beans, and just a little sugar and is a chewy treat!

It's a rice mill.

We visit a Buddhist monastery to receive a water blessing. We kneel before the monk, place our hands in prayer, and remain still for as long as he continues chanting.  As he chants he flings water on us from a bowl in front of him. I am amazed at how moved I am!

Getting ready for the New Year's celebration April 15th.

Everywhere you look there are more beautiful photos just begging to be taken!

Half Basket!!

Behind the monastery is an ancient temple that must be explored! And there are stairs, so Ginger must climb them!  My tombstone will read "She followed Ginger one time too many!" But it was worth it!

New friends from Austria

Work on the enormous statue of the Buddha was halted before completion because it is located in a moat the belongs to the monastery and it is an historical site.  Nothing can be added or changed! 

Fuel for the fires

The wine maker

Step one in making the yeast.  Cook down the rice.

Spread it here to dry.

Play with the kitty cats!

Some processes are universal!

Next comes the tasting!

Here's the whole operation

And the bottling process

Across the river, and a short drive away, we visit another ancient artifact, but this one is a man who makes homemade Cambodia rice wine! He starts by making his own yeast with ingredients I never would have imagined! The wine is 45% alcohol!  Then he adds fruit of some kind, banana or whatever is in season, and that brings it down to 30%.  Had to try it!! I thought the 45% version was much easier to drink than I expected.  You just can't think of it as wine!  It's liquor at that point!!  And the pseudo-sangria as quite nice, too!  Of course, it might be the excitement of the visit coloring my judgement!

Time for lunch at the White Rose Restaurant.  Soy escorts us upstairs and we order our beverages while looking at the menu.  We're thinking just an appetizer might be just the thing, but Soy finds us and takes away the menu.  We're having the fixed menu and, once again, it could have feed four people!!

When we've cried uncle, with an embarrassing amount of food left on the serving plates, the sweet young thing tries to bring the fruit plate.  We demur and she doesn't quite know what to do, so she clears the table.  And comes back with the fruit plate anyway! It's beauti
ful and after staring at it for a minute, we each try an unknown fruit that is quite a taste treat! And there's another unknown that is a treat for the tongue.  But now we're really, really done!

Soy finds us and says the first one is jack fruit, one of the ones the wine maker puts in is "milder" beverage.  We still don't know what the other one is;  but we'll investigate later.

We're pretty sure this isn't up to the wiring code!

It's time to check into our hotel, Classy Hotel, and it is really elegant with breath-taking carved wood decorating the walls of the lobby and chairs fit for a palace.  We have about an hour to drop our bags and get ready for the evening's adventure.  We're really careful not to put our feet up because we'd fall asleep and miss everything!!

Love all the forms of transportation!

We're heading to the cave from which tens of thousands of bat will be emerging at sunset! Across the street from the cave is another monastery for us to explore.  But then we can see across the street and three gigantic images of the Buddha are being carved into the side of the rock, rather like Stone Mountain or Mount Rushmore! The craftsmanship is superb and, in fact, some of the workman are still at it when we arrive! 

The snakes will keep the evil demons away.

All the signs of the zodiac are here.

So many Buddhas carrying a rice bowl

The cave is to the right.

There is a troop of monkeys playing around the base of the stairs that allow acess to the monastery on the top of the hill.  There are a couple of babies and there's a guy sitting in his cart that occasionally gives them a piece of fruit.

Not the usual spirit in a spirit house!

Contemplation

Le bebe

Special visitors using the stairs we declined!  The monastery on the
top of the mountain is probably gorgeous.  Oh, well.

Maybe we'll see them making their exit

This is thatch material that lasts longer than you'd expect.

There's an excited air, like waiting for the Fourth of July parade, as people sit around plastic tables or in other chairs, some having a picnic, other's drinking Cambodian beer of other beverages.  Young ladies circulate taking orders and Soy gets us each a Black Panther, which is a dark stout from Germany. Several of the breweries print a word on the inside of the pull tab and as soon as the little kids spot a new can being delivered they rush over begging for the tab!  Who knew that was a thing.  Ours both say "Thank you".  Ginger flips hers into the air to avoid chosing a kid.  I give mine to Soy and he lectures the kids on the evils of alcohol for children and urges them to study hard!

Such exquisite details!

There are one or three bats flying above us and we figure they're the advance scouts and we still have to wait for twilight.  Suddently there is ribbons of flapping wings emerging from the cave!  What a sight!!  And it goes on and one!  W couldn't even begin to estimate the numbers but sources aay there are millions of these tiny insect eaters!  We watch in fascination until they have all made their escape and make our way back to the car.  Most people have parked right at the site and now have to fight their way onto the road.  Soy is so much smarter and we walk back to the monastery and have an easy time of.

Back to our new home, for one night, and we are determined do not just hibernate as we've been doing.  By George, we're going out and find some little tidbit to eat.  The center of the city is just across the bridge and we go exploring.  Oh, did I mention that there aren't any traffic lights?  There's just a continuous stream of scooters, cars, trucks, and bicycles!  Ginger is determined, despite my request for a helicopter to get us across the street! Finally she spots a hole in both directions and we zip across.  Of course, after we cross the bridge there's another road just like it!

Abstract view of the Blood Moon from a moving car!

New Year's is coming!

Anyway, we settle on one stand that has things on a stick and we choose the one that looks most like it might be a meat ball.  It goes into a plastic cup and the sweet young thing pours some sauce over it. With only a bit of trouble we figure out the money and sit to share.  I have the first one and it is definitely some kind of meat??  Ginger was the hungry one, so she gets the other two.  

Yep, meat on a stick!

We're still a bit peckish, though, so we continue strolling and find a pizza stand!  The guy has a regular stove stuffed into his vehicle and the biggest smile in the world.  Everyone here seems to be so peaceful.  There are no honking horns, unless you are warning that you are passing another vehicle, and no angy faces.  I guess being a 90% Buddhist country actually affects the way people behave.

So, our smiling chef begins working on a pizza which is a little scary since we hadn't chosen one yet.  But he grins from ear to ear and grates the cheese atop whatever he' built there! A young college student stikes up a conversation with us!  He says he's shy with tourists but he has admirable language skills and says that he father has been in the military fro thirty or forty years and doesn't want his son to do that.  Later we discuss what it must have been like for his dad, with so many conflicts and the terrors of the Khmer Rouge years.  They killed about two million people during their five year reign of destruction, nearly a quarter of the population.

We see with relief that the pizza belongs to our new friend and after he takes possession we place our order.  It's all done with pointing except for the chef's limited vocabulary of "large or small" and "one or two"!  He's got everytihing he needs to know!  He offers us a seat on little stools that are about a foot off the ground, with a table to match, and presently we have our first Cambodian pizza!  It's got red and green peppers and onions and it really just we needed to finish our day, especially since we couldn't find rat -on-a-stick!

Almost home!

And here we are!

Now we just have to negotiate the traffic once more and we're home and ready immediately to turn out the lights!  Hey, we made it to 9:15!  That's a record for us!

(My computer refuses to sync all my photos and I don't have it in me to fight with it right now. Photos will have to wait - sorry!)  Whatever was wrong, two days later all the photos showed up!!  That's why everything is so late!