Southeast Asia Day 5: – Church, Traditional Cambodian Home, Battambang Resort, Bat Cave
Sunday was a down day for us. At 8:30 am we left to go to a local church meeting where we found a translator to help us understand what the various speakers were saying. It was the perfect opportunity to meet local people from the community and hear about their experiences and life in Cambodia. I always find churches to be great community gathering places where one can learn from the lives of locals on the other side of the world.
On our way to our hotel, we stopped at a traditional Cambodian home that had been turned into a museum. Here we were able to see a hundred-year-old home built on stilts. It has had quite a history as the family was evicted from the home by the Khmer Rouge to house 200 of its soldiers. They eventually got the home back after the Khmer Rouge was removed from power in 1979. Today it has many artifacts used over the past hundred years, and the family has photos of early family members that lived in the home.
We checked into the Battambang Resort with its large pool, man-made lake, and neighboring farm and rice field that supplies its restaurant with fresh ingredients. It was a great place to relax and listen to the rain as it poured down for hours in the afternoon.
It was pouring when we met with our guide to take us to the “Bat Cave”. We just got some raincoats and prepared to enjoy an evening in the pouring rain. By the time we got to the site we were visiting for the evening, however, the rain was just a drizzle. The side of the mountain had a large Buddha statue carved into it along with a reclined Buddha and other artwork. To the side of these carvings was a large cave that goes hundreds of feet deep into the limestone mountain.
We could hear the screeching din of bats in the distance, and the odor of bat dung was very obvious even though we were hundreds of feet away from the cave entrance. The typical 5:15 pm start time of the exodus of 1.8 million bats was delayed by about 30 minutes due to the rain which finally stopped. As it started getting very dark outside, a trickle of bats started flying out of the cave which was followed by a steady stream that looked like a river of black specks winding like waves in the sky. It was certainly an interesting sight to see and to learn that bats eat 50 to 100% of their body weight each night over the course of the following 12 hours. It was a great finale to a bit of a down day.
