The Motorbike Bandits

After a few days in bed, I am very happy to say that I'm back on my feet and have an appetite again. As Brian hoped, Monty has taken a hike. We're really hoping we don't run into him again on this trip!

Today was a great way to celebrate my return to health! Brian and I took a motorbike tour into the countryside around Battambang. We had a great tour guide and some great company with a couple of Kiwis we met at our hotel.

This is a "cricket catcher". At night they put a battery powered light above the white plastic and the crickets fly into it. They then fall into the pan beneath it and are trapped in the water. Khmers collect the crickets and they become part of their meal for the day!

The scenery on our trip was amazing. This whole area of Cambodia is very flat (as I think most of the country is). Everywhere you go, people are growing rice. Rice grows during the rainy season and can take up to 6 months to mature. They are able to grow another type of rice which is called "summer rice", and as the name suggests it is grown in the summer. It only takes 3 months to harvest this type of rice.

A woman thinning summer rice. I think this would be worse than suckering grapes!

A view of the flat rice fields stretching as far as the eye can see!

The first stop on our trip was to the "Killing Caves". I'm sure many of you have heard about the horrible massacre of the Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge. We'd heard about it, but only since we've been here have we learned the details of the horror that these people have gone through. I'll give you a bit of history now, but perhaps we can follow it with some more background later on. The Khmer Rouge gained control of Cambodia after many years of war. Initially everyone was excited as they promised freedom for the country of Cambodia. It took only days for people's joy to turn into fear. The Khmer Rouge commanded everyone living in cities to leave the city and head into the country. They told the people only to pack what they would need for three days. They then marched all the people from the cities into the countryside where they forced them to live, never to return to the country again. Then began the reign of killing. They believed that anyone educated, or anyone that lived in the city was too "Americanized" and that they should be killed. Anyone who was heard grumbling or complaining about the new leaders was immediatly "taken to school", in otherwords, killed without warning. Whole families and villages were massacred with sticks or hoes and then often thrown into caves or graves to die. At the caves we saw today it is believed that over 10 000 people were killed. It was a very sobering place to be.

People were thrown down into the caves through this opening. The fall was about 10 metres.

This was also in the caves....The flags you see are Buddhist prayer flags. There is a reclining Bhudda to the left and the house in the middle had some of the bones in it from the people who were killed. The people in the photo are the Kiwis we spent the day with.

We were also able to see some fruit bats in some of the trees. These bats eat any type of ripe fruit in the area. This can be a problem for some farmers who try to fend the bats off by tying plastic bags around the trees.

A view of the river (the same one we travelled on by boat). On the right bank is a peanut farm.

The next stop on our journey took us to a local farm. We were able to see some pretty cool pigs, some pineapple plants, pomelo trees, and also got to sample some rice wine. The stuff we tried was about 30% alcohol, or so they told us, but they also offered us a pretty potent drink at 70%. We declined.

A pineapple plant!

Rice wine and bananas! (We had some great pineapple too!)

Our last stop was to see the bamboo trains people have ingeniously created to transport people and products along railway tracks. They can be assembled and disassembled within a matter of minutes if a train is approaching, and these things move! We don't have a great picture of them because they were going a little too fast for us to get a good shot.

All in all it was a great day....I don't know if you can tell or not from some of the pictures but we were absolutely filthy by the end of the day! It's soooo dusty here! We had some great showers and now it's off to the food stalls for some supper!

These next pictures are some of the cute and really friendly kids in the villages. They were always excited to see us.