Siem Reap to Battambang: Take the Boat If the Water Is High

This is the best transfer in Cambodia and most visitors never hear about it.

The boat leaves Siem Reap early, crosses the top of the Tonle Sap, and then turns up the Sangker river to Battambang. It takes six to nine hours depending on the water, and it is not a ferry - it is a narrow wooden boat that spends most of the day in channels barely wider than itself, passing floating villages, fish traps, flooded forest, children swimming, and houses that move with the season.

It only runs when the water is high, roughly August to January, and in a poor year that window is shorter. In the dry months the boat either does not run or grounds. Check locally before you build a plan around it, and book a seat ahead - capacity is small.

It is not comfortable. Wooden benches, engine noise, no shade in places, and a long day. Nobody describes it as relaxing and almost everybody describes it as the best thing they did.

The Tonle Sap reverses direction twice a year, and this journey is the clearest way to understand what that means - you are crossing water that will not be there in April.

About 170 kilometres and three to three and a half hours on a surfaced road, through rice country and roadside markets.

Bus - several operators, roughly USD 6-15, three and a half to four hours with a stop. Book a day ahead in the November-to-February peak.

Minivan - faster, tighter, three hours if the driver hurries.

Private car with driver - from about USD 60-80, and worth it for two or more because it lets you stop. There is not a great deal on this road, but the villages and the palm-sugar stalls are worth ten minutes.

Leave in the morning. You want to arrive with the afternoon intact, because the whole point of Battambang is what happens at dusk.

Onward to Phnom Penh is about 290 kilometres and five hours on National Road 5. Siem Reap → Battambang → Phnom Penh is roughly eight and a half hours of road against six going direct, so the detour costs two and a half hours and buys a city. Our six-day and seven-day itineraries are built on exactly that.

Phnom Sampeau at dusk. Millions of wrinkle-lipped bats leave a cliff cave in an unbroken ribbon for about half an hour. No build-up, no warm-up: nothing, then a stream that does not stop. People watch with a drink from the stalls below. It costs nothing and it is one of the best things in the country. Be in place twenty minutes before sunset.

The same hill has a killing cave, where victims were thrown through a shaft in the rock, with a memorial and a reclining Buddha at the bottom. Quiet, unvisited and in some ways harder than Choeung Ek.

The bamboo train (norry) - a bamboo platform on wheels with a small motor on a single track, the lighter cart lifted off by hand when two meet. The original line at O Dambong was replaced by a purpose-built tourist track at Banan, which is worth knowing before you buy the ticket. The mechanism is real; the route is for visitors.

The town. French shophouses along the river, a working market, and the calmest streets on the circuit. Phare Ponleu Selpak, the arts school the Cambodian circus came out of, is here and can be visited.

Banan and Ek Phnom are eleventh-century temples with almost nobody at them - a useful corrective if you are templed out from Angkor.

One night covers the bamboo train and the bats, which is the standard stop and works.

Two nights adds Banan, the countryside, the arts school and a day of doing very little, which Battambang is unusually good for.

Why bother at all, when Siem Reap to Phnom Penh is a direct six hours?

Because Battambang is the only place on the standard Cambodian route that is not organised around visitors. Siem Reap exists for Angkor and Phnom Penh is a capital; Battambang is a provincial town that happens to be pleasant, and the difference is immediately obvious. Prices are local prices, the market is a market, and nobody is selling you anything on the street.

It also sits correctly for the history. Meeting the killing cave at Phnom Sampeau before Tuol Sleng gives the Khmer Rouge story a shape that Phnom Penh alone does not - it makes clear that this happened everywhere, not in one building in the capital.

If you are going the other way, the Phnom Penh to Battambang route covers the southern leg.