Friday, February 28, 2014
After a very good morning visiting 3 sites in the vicinity of Battambang followed with lunch there, we drove on to Sisophon. The town mostly acts as a travelers’s stop between Siem Reap (Angkor Wat) and the Thailand border and consequently doesn’t have much to offer. We were just after a hotel for the night and ended up at the Preah Chan Hotel, a few kilometers out of town. I wasn’t that impressed with it (and still am not), but when the power went out in the whole of Sisophon (and, as we found out the next day, in the greater region) and our hotel turned out to be the only building in town that still had power, I couldn’t complain now, could I? And yes, we did go for a drive during the power outage and no kidding: all was dark.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Up really early, and not thanks to our alarm but some awful noise from next to the hotel starting at 4:20am…. And it never stopped.
We set off on the road to Banteay Chhmar; a road totally ‘under construction’ to put it mildly. Average speed: 30-35km/hr. But we knew that.
Sixty odd kilometers north and later we arrived at our stop for the morning: the ruins of Banteay Chhmar. This site is not on the regular tourist list as it is a bit ‘out of the way’, which of course was part of the attraction for us. Thank you Coen and Marijke for bringing it to our attention. We had the whole place to ourselves apart from conservationists working on site. We were allowed to climb on and over the ruins which was pretty awesome – Lara Croft watch out :). Definitely worth the detour.
