Battambang and beyond

From Siem Reap, yesterday, I took the boat down the Tonle Sap to Battambang, Cambodia's second city. The boat trip lasted seven and a half hours, but was pretty scenic and passed through a number of farming and fishing villages, picking up and dropping off locals on the way. Battambang itself is a fairly ordinary town, although there are some olf french style facaded houses by the riverfront. I'd heard and read that the country surrounding Battambang was more interesting than the city itself, so I hired a moto guide today and took off on a tour of some of the sites. This included a couple of remote temples, farming villages and some old Khmer Rouge cave prisons / torture chambers, which chillingly had a cage full of human bones and skulls on display. My moto driver was 50, so he had lived through the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge genocide regime, and shared with me his sad personal story - during Pol Pot's dictatorship he had lost both his parents and three siblings; some murdered, the others starved or died of malaria. An interesting day - learning about several aspects of Cambodia: past and present.