Battambang: Cambodia's Colonial Second City

Battambang's old quarter, strung along the Sangker River, holds Cambodia's most intact collection of French colonial and Chinese shophouse architecture — two and three-storey buildings with shuttered upper windows and covered ground-floor arcades, largely still in everyday commercial use rather than converted purely for tourism. Walking or cycling the riverside and the surrounding grid, past the old governor's residence and Cambodia's oldest surviving cinema building, gives Battambang a genuinely different texture from Siem Reap or Phnom Penh — quieter, less restored, and correspondingly more atmospheric for it.

Known locally as the norry, the Bamboo Train is a genuinely improvised piece of transport: a removable bamboo platform set on two independent wheel axles, powered by a small motor and belt drive, that once carried cargo and passengers along the old French-built rail line when formal rail service had collapsed. Where standard trains would need signalling and timetables, the norry solves the problem of two carts meeting head-on with simple physics — the lighter platform is lifted clear of the rails by hand to let the other pass, then set back down to continue. It now runs mainly as a tourist ride through rice fields and small villages rather than for cargo, but the mechanism itself, and the ride's genuinely rattling, open-air character, haven't changed.

Phnom Sampeau, a hill a short drive outside Battambang town, is visited for two things most visitors experience in the same trip: a hilltop temple with sweeping views over the surrounding countryside, and, at dusk, one of Cambodia's most striking natural spectacles — millions of bats pouring continuously out of a cave mouth in the hillside for the better part of an hour, watched by visitors gathered at a viewing area below. The hill's caves were also used as an execution site during the Khmer Rouge period, a history named plainly here rather than omitted, and treated in the same sober, visitor-destination register the country's dedicated memorial sites deserve.

Phare Ponleu Selpak, the arts school and social enterprise behind the internationally touring Cambodian Circus, was founded in Battambang in 1994 as a school for at-risk and war-affected youth, and it remains the organisation's training campus today — distinct from the circus's own dedicated performance venue in Siem Reap, where most visitors actually see a show. Battambang's campus occasionally opens performances and workshops to visitors as well, offering a different, more grounded angle on the same organisation's work than the polished Siem Reap venue does.