Battambang and the north-west

Battambang sits half way between Siem Reap and the Thai border on a slow brown river, and it is the Cambodia most people say they were hoping to find. Nothing here is a queue. It is also the country’s creative capital, with a circus school of international reputation and a gallery scene that grew out of it.

The town

One of the best-preserved French colonial streetscapes in South-East Asia, still lived in rather than restored for visitors: two-storey shophouses with shuttered balconies, a covered market, and a riverside that fills at dusk. It is small enough to walk and flat enough to cycle.

Phare Ponleu Selpak

The circus school. It began as an art-therapy project in a refugee camp and became a professional performing-arts academy whose graduates tour the world; the sister company performs nightly in Siem Reap. Seeing a show in the tent where the students actually train, on the edge of Battambang, is a completely different and better experience.

Out of town

The bamboo train, a plank on wheels running on an abandoned line, has moved to a purpose-built track and is now firmly an attraction rather than a transport oddity — enjoyable, but not what it was. What has not changed is the countryside: Wat Banan on its hilltop, the fruit-bat cave at Phnom Sampeau, the rice-paper and fish-paste villages along the river, and a killing-cave memorial that is quieter and no less serious than the ones near the capital.

At dusk, several million bats pour out of the cliff at Phnom Sampeau in a continuous ribbon for half an hour. It is free, it happens every evening, and it is one of the great natural spectacles in the country.

Getting there

Three hours by road from Siem Reap, five or six from Phnom Penh. In the wet season a boat runs from Siem Reap across the Tonlé Sap and up the Sangkae river — seven to nine hours, floating villages, and one of the best journeys in the country when the water is high enough.

Common questions