Cambodia Daytrips: The Road from Battambang to Ek Phnom
The northern route out to Ek Phnom will take you along the river road with the normally benign and muddy stream of brown water weaving its way to your left of Battambang old town.
This route has recently been sealed for most of way out to Ek Phnom but could previously get muddy or even flooded in the wet season; nevertheless, it’s a lovely shady route out to one of Battambang’s biggest tourist draws. Your journey begins at the boat dock with the chance to stock up on French baguettes from the city’s best bread shop. The municipal hospital is across the road to your left and by continuing along the river road for a handful of minutes, you’ll soon have left behind the city’s brick houses, traffic, loud impatient car horns and be looking at the typical wooden stilt dwellings of Khmer communities who live near to and often make their livelihoods from the river.
The first Wat you’ll pass is Wat Leap in Wat Leap village; built in the modern Thai style it has little to offer or detain visitors. Soon after, however, you’ll see, to your left, Battambang’s former Pepsi Cola factory which has an intriguing history. This large complex of distinctively designed warehouses still carries the Pepsi Cola logo and apart from a few bullet holes and some slight shell damage is structurally intact. Walking inside though, involves stepping back in time. The vast warehouse still contains the original bottling machinery from the 1960’s plus about 10,000 bottles, stamped ‘1972,’ of Pepsi, Miranda, Singha Soda and Teem. The sense of history here is palpable.
The story goes that the Thai government of the time signed a sweetheart deal with Pepsi’s competitors, the Coca-Cola Company and therefore only Coca-Cola could be manufactured under license in Thailand. Pepsi therefore, set up a bottling plant within easy reach of the Thai border and exported their fizzy drinks until 1972 when the border became no longer secure. The factory was abruptly shut down when the KR took Battambang in 1975; however, every Khmer New Year the KR opened the factory for a few days to make ice before shutting it again for another year. When the Vietnamese came they re-opened the factory to make ice and these days the factory produces fresh drinking water.
Carrying on and passing as always wayside tables selling small snacks of dried and cured fish (with a rich sea shore smell), baked banana and corn, you’ll find also to the left, Wat Rum Dual. Rum Dual is the name of a flower and was also the name of a song popularized by singer Ros Sereysothea who was born to a poor family in Battambang Province and achieved great fame in the 1960’s as the leading female proponent of Khmer Garage Rock.
Khmer Garage or psychedelic rock was a frenetic and purely Khmer 60’s genre of popular music epitomised by loud thrashing drums, wailing guitars, the full-on use of the farsifa electric organ and Khmer language reinterpretations of Western rock classics set to a frantic beat. Eventually, Ros Sereysothea, the Queen of Khmer Garage Rock, was honored by King Norodom Siahanouk with the royal title, “Preah Rheich Teany Somlang Meas”, or the “Golden Voice of the Royal Capital,” but sadly her career came to an end with the takeover of Cambodia by the KR in 1975, after which she was sent out into the fields digging irrigation ditches like the rest of the ‘new people.’
It is known that she was made to sing songs honoring Pol Pot and was placed into an arranged marriage with a KR cadre: however, after 1977, the trail goes cold and no one really knows what became of Cambodia’s most popular ever woman singer.
These days the fine Californian musicians, Dengue Fever (who come complete with an expatriate Khmer female singer) have re popularized much of Ros Sereysothea’s music thereby allowing her legacy to live on.
Continuing on and passing a Muslim village (as ever, identifiable by ethnic Cham women pottering about wearing long and brightly coloured headscarves) you’ll arrive at Wat Slaket which is surrounded by tall palms and has been painted in a rich, vivid and less than gentle cream paint. A decrepit and ruined vihear sits alongside.
Standing astride the wat (where you will be welcomed by curious but genial monks) there are two imposing statues of battle elephants, both rich in symbolism.
One portrays a man cutting off the elephants tusks and is thought to represent an ancient Khmer folktale. The elephant has purposefully allowed itself to be caught by a hunter who is then inadvertently trapped and killed by other elephants.
The second elephant is painted entirely white and wears a blue sash. This is meant to represent the UNTAC period of recent Khmer history and shows the UN colours, although for those with a different take on UNTAC, the white elephant might illustrate a quite different metaphor. After travelling a short distance from Wat Slaket look again to your left, across from the palm-shaded river and you’ll see a fabulous, courtly French built colonial villa sitting in its own grounds with accompanying stables, outbuildings, servant’s quarters and a large plantation area to the rear.
The Khmer family currently living there have taken reasonably good care of the structure and have resisted the temptation to tile the exterior, rip out the shuttered windows or do anything else that would vandalise such a glorious property. They found the building vacant in 1979 after the KR had been chased out of the area, moved in, and have been there ever since.
Another Wat lies not much further ahead along the road to Ek Phnom and this is Wat Kadol, an older Wat built in the lower style. The unusually large expanse of flat concrete in the foreground of the Wat is a legacy of the KR period when it was built to lay out and dry rice whilst the monk’s quarters to the right were converted into a sewing factory. The KR met their match, however, inside the Wat’s vihear as they found themselves unable, however much they tried, to shift and despatch a statue of an enigmatic, enthroned, four-faced Buddha.
Eventually a tractor was brought in, roped to the statue and still failed to complete the task, after which the KR miserably gave up. These days the same statue is reputed to bring good fortune to gamblers who, after bestowing an appropriate financial offering to bless the statue, are allowed to rub it gently and then after looking very closely and perhaps squinting their eyes a little, might just see some winning lottery numbers in the stone.
Wat Kadol is also well known for the raucous celebrations that take place there every evening during the yearly Water Festival when families travel for miles to join in the fun. When you get the village of Dun Teaw, there is small bridge leading to a deserted, vaguely derelict and bombed out looking factory.
This compound (bombed with rockets by the Khmer Rouge in 1991) used to make jute (a vegetable fibre used chiefly to make cloth for wrapping bales of raw cotton and to make sacks) and provided jobs for many local residents. But for several reasons, including the ASEAN treaty which made jute imports from Thailand extremely cheap, the factory was forced out of business in 2000. Retracing your route over the bridge and returning to the Ek Phnom route, you will notice that the road is now rough and ungraded. In the wet season this could lead to muddy and uncomfortable conditions, albeit on one of the most beguiling stretches of the route which takes you through a landscape of coconut palms and mud caked buffalos.
This small and fascinating area is assailed on all sides by houses that specialise in making the rice paper used to wrap the local nem or spring rolls served in many restaurants and street stalls. Amongst all the cooking pots and other household odds and ends, look out for the metallic looking spiral shaped discs hanging out to dry like chilli peppers at regular intervals and on wooden frameworks outside the local wooden dwellings. The process of making them is aided by the heat of the rice chaff after which they are laid out to dry. Look out also for the bottles and clear plastic bags of ‘blood’ festooned across gateposts in this area.
This ‘blood’ (actually coloured water) is an attempt by locals to distract blood eating monsters from entering their houses -monsters, we would perhaps call vampires. It is clear that the seeds of the vampire myth have fallen on fertile soil in Daun Teaw. The route onwards and towards Ek Phnom now has a stillness and tranquillity as the houses and shacks thin out. Jolly children will wave as you drive through rice paddies and across open country before finally reaching the ruins of Ek Phnom situated on a small hill surrounded by a lily and lotus filled moat. It’s possible to stop here and have a cold drink or perhaps even a plate of dried and cured snake meat in the shade and next to a shimmering lotus pond.
Directly in front of the drink stall is Wat Ek Phnom constructed six years ago (after its ruination in the 1980’s when it was used as a Vietnamese ammunition dump) which is possibly the most garishly coloured wat in the province and somewhat reminiscent of Norman Lewis’s description of a Cao Dai temple, being ‘an example of fun fair architecture in extreme form,’ and liable to provoke a reaction of fascinated horror.
Looking beyond the clashing reds, oranges, other assorted colours of the rainbow and glistening glided and painted features, one notices that unlike most pagodas, Wat Ek Phnom contains no crematorium. Instead a simple coffin sized and makeshift crematorium is used for deceased monks but local villagers have to make their own arrangements, which usually involves chopping down a banana tree and constructing a funeral pyre with that and charcoal. You have now arrived at Ek Phnom.
