Wet Underpants, Temples and Crocodiles

This morning we rented a motorbike to explore the area around Battanbang. It took a while to find anyone who had an automatic bike as everyplace seemed to only rent out manual bikes which I'm pretty terrible at driving. The restaurant next to our accommodation had an automatic bike, it was the waiter's personal bike and I could tell immediately that he was very fond of it. "It's small but powerful" he said with a large grin of proud ownership. I made sure to take lots of pictures of the bike before riding this time to prevent any problems when returning the bike.

As soon as I had given the guy the money for the motorbike it started to rain. Monsoon style downpours that made it look like someone was up in the sky pouring bucket after bucket of water. We waited about 20 minutes to see if it would let up and when it didn't we decided to just go with it and climbed onto the bike and headed out.

First we headed South to an area called Phnom Sampeu where we were met with a tourist road block that insisted that I pay them 2000 Cambodian Riel ($.50) to park my bike. I didn't want to park my bike but they wouldn't get out of the way or move the road block until I paid so I gave them 2000 Riel and then drove around the barricade 100 meters up to a ticket booth where we had to buy tickets to access the area. I tried to get the tourist police officer to help me get my 2000 Riel back from the "parking people" but he seemed to agree that I should pay them that money to park despite not wanting to park.

I drove the motorbike up a steep hill to a temple and a sign for the Killing Caves. A small boy who was maybe eight immediately tried to be our tour guide by pointing out really obvious things to us and following us around. Despite repeated attempts to tell him we didn't want a guide and would not pay him anything he persisted in following us and pointing out the obvious. We followed the signs to the killing caves where the Khmer Rouge lead blindfolded people to plummet to their death 30 meters down a hole to sharp rocks below. There is a shrine filled with bones and skulls.

After the killing cave we walked up to a gold Buddha on a hill. We were joined from the opposite direction by a bunch of guys wearing military fatigues accompanied by little boys. I assumed they were the Boy Scouts of Cambodia, or some similar organisation, taking the kids on hike. The adult men were leering at Janelle and asked if they could take a picture with us, we agreed but then one of the guys tried to stick a banana in Janelle's face, I quickly grabbed it and threw it while we quickly walked off in the other direction.

I drove the bike further up the mountain to a monastery with great views of the surrounding area and wild monkeys who were causing all kinds of mischief.

We headed back North through town, where we changed our soaking clothes, towards another temple. Our guidebook said that there was an old Pepsi factory that you could walk around but there was a guard at the gate who wouldn't let us in. He had two small children with him and we spent about 20 minutes saying random phrases in Khmer (Cambodian language) and English.

After the disappointment of not being able to walk around the Pepsi plant we weren't expecting much from their next suggestion of a crocodile farm. We drove down some random back roads following cardboard signs for the crocodile farm. When we got there to a house with a gate there was no one around and were were about to leave when a woman with two children in tow showed up. She had really good English and said that it was only $1 to see both the big and baby crocodiles. I expected that there would be 4-5 crocodiles behind metal fences. We walked down a concrete path and up some steps to a platform. On each side of the platform were two identical of these:

One of the crocodiles moved, and I screamed like a little girl, jumped in the air and nearly peed myself. I have never seen so many crocodiles in all of my life and they were all so close. We walked a short distance down the road and were shown the baby crocodiles. The woman was really helpful that shows us around telling us that most of the adult crocodiles are sold for their skin and sell for more than $1000 each.

We also made our way to a small temple that looks like it will be a small example of what we have to look forward to in Siem Reap in a couple of days.

Check out all of today's pictures in the slideshow below: