Battambang is Cambodia's second city, but it feels like a large village. The town spreads along both banks of the Sangker river, with French colonial shophouses around the central market and wooden Khmer houses on stilts further out. The surrounding province is one of the country's most important rice-growing regions.
The best way to see the countryside is by bicycle. Quiet roads follow the river past family workshops making rice paper, dried bananas and fish paste, and past temples where monks tend vegetable gardens. Life here moves slowly, and visitors are welcomed with genuine curiosity.
Outside town, the hill of Phnom Sampeau is topped by a temple with wide views over the plains. At dusk, millions of bats stream out of a cave in its side in a long dark ribbon across the sky. The hill also holds a memorial to the Khmer Rouge years, which we visit with a local guide.
Battambang has become a centre for Cambodian arts. Phare Ponleu Selpak, a school founded in the 1990s, trains young people in circus, music and visual arts, and its students perform in the evenings. Galleries and small cafés around the old town show the work of a new generation of Cambodian painters and photographers.
