Battambang and the Bamboo Train: Cambodia’s Second City

A bamboo platform on two axles doing forty kilometres an hour down a warped single track, and when another one comes the other way somebody’s gets dismantled. Battambang is the most likeable town in Cambodia and almost nobody stops there.

The second city nobody visits

Battambang is Cambodia’s second or third largest city depending on how you count, it sits on the Sangker river in the rice country west of the Tonlé Sap, and the overwhelming majority of visitors to Cambodia go nowhere near it.

That is partly geography. It is on the road between Siem Reap and the Thai border, which used to be a route people took and which has been considerably quieter since that border closed. And it is partly that Cambodia’s tourism gravity is so strong at Angkor that almost nothing else gets a look.

What is there is a town of French colonial shophouses along a river, some of the best-preserved architecture in the country, a genuine arts scene, the finest countryside temples nobody has heard of, and a railway line with something absurd running on it.

On our fifteen-day route it is day nine, after Angkor, and it is where the trip stops being about ancient stones and starts being about the country as it is now.

The norry

The bamboo train, locally the norry, is one of those things that sounds like a tourist invention and is not. It was a genuine piece of improvised transport that emerged because the railway existed and the trains did not.

The vehicle is a bamboo platform about three metres by two, resting on two independent axle sets, driven by a small engine with a belt to the rear axle. No frame connecting the parts. No brakes worth the name. It sits on the rails and it goes.

The track it runs on is the old line toward the Thai border, laid in the colonial period and neglected for decades. The rails have gaps, the sleepers are uneven, and the whole thing produces a rhythmic clatter and a rolling motion that is exactly as unnerving and as entertaining as it sounds.

What made it famous is the passing protocol. The line is single track, so when two norries meet, the one with fewer passengers or less cargo is lifted off, in pieces, by hand: platform off, axles off, other one goes past, put it back together. The whole operation takes under a minute because everybody has done it a thousand times.

The complicated bit about which one you ride

Honesty required, because this is a place where the guidebook and the ground have diverged.

The original norry line at O Dambong on the edge of Battambang was largely shut down when the national railway was rehabilitated, since running an improvised bamboo platform on an active freight line is not compatible with an active freight line. What replaced it is a purpose-built tourist section at Banan, several kilometres of track laid specifically for it, running through countryside to a station at the far end where there are drinks and souvenirs.

The Banan version is safe, organised, comfortable and unmistakably built for visitors. The original was chaotic and authentic and no longer really exists in that form.

People who rode the old one are sniffy about the new one. People who ride the new one enjoy it enormously. Both positions are fair, and it is worth knowing which one you are getting rather than expecting the version in a ten-year-old blog post.

The countryside temples

What actually makes Battambang worth a day is not the train. It is what is in the fields around it.

Phnom Banan sits on a hill south of the town, three hundred and fifty-odd steps up, with five brick towers at the top from the eleventh century. It is a smaller and considerably older relative of the Angkor style, it is almost empty, and the view over the rice country from the top is worth the climb even without the temple.

Wat Ek Phnom, north of the town, is an eleventh-century sandstone temple that has partly collapsed and been left alone, sitting next to a large modern Buddha and a working pagoda. The juxtaposition of an ancient ruin and a busy contemporary temple in the same compound tells you something about how these places are actually used.

Neither has a ticket office queue. After the volume of Angkor, riding out to a thousand-year-old temple with nobody at it is a specific pleasure.

Phnom Sampeau, and the part that is not pleasant

South of the town there is a limestone hill with a temple on top and caves in the side of it, and the caves are a killing site from the Khmer Rouge period.

People were brought up the hill and thrown into a skylight in the cave roof. The remains are memorialised inside. It is a small, dark, quiet place and it is affecting in a way the larger and better-known sites near Phnom Penh, with their scale and their museum apparatus, sometimes are not.

Cambodia’s recent history is not something a visitor can ride around, and any honest itinerary has to make room for it somewhere. Battambang is where it sits on this route, and it sits alongside the pleasant things rather than being cordoned off from them, which is roughly how it exists in the country as well.

The bats, which are the best free show in Cambodia

On the same hill, at dusk, something entirely different happens.

A cave in the side of Phnom Sampeau holds a colony of wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bats numbering in the millions. Around six in the evening they come out, and they do not come out in a cloud. They come out in a continuous ribbon, a dark stream pouring from the cave mouth and twisting away across the rice fields, and it goes on without a break for the better part of half an hour.

There are plastic chairs and beer vendors set up at the bottom of the hill facing the cave, because everybody local knows. You sit down at half past five with a cold drink and watch several million animals leave for work.

It costs nothing and it is one of the two or three genuinely extraordinary wildlife spectacles in Southeast Asia. Nobody expects it and everybody talks about it afterwards.

The circus, which is not what it sounds like

Phare Ponleu Selpak is an arts organisation founded by young Cambodians who had grown up in refugee camps on the Thai border, using art as a way to work through what had happened to them. It runs a school, teaches music, drawing, theatre and circus arts, and puts on performances.

The circus is contemporary, physical and narrative rather than animals-and-trapeze, and the performers are students and graduates of the school. The shows deal with Cambodian history, village life and social themes, and they are good by any standard rather than good for a charitable enterprise.

Ticket money funds the school. It is a rare case where the obviously worthy thing to do in a town is also the most enjoyable evening available.

The town itself

Walk the riverfront in the early evening and Battambang does something few Cambodian towns manage: it feels like a place people live rather than a place people visit.

The colonial shophouses along Street 2 and 2.5 are the best surviving stretch in the country, two-storey French-influenced buildings with shuttered windows and deep verandas, a lot of them now cafés and galleries run by people who moved back. There is a genuine art scene, several good bakeries, and coffee that would not embarrass a European city.

It is also, importantly, cheap and unhurried. Nobody is selling you a tuk-tuk ride every thirty seconds.

Riding into and out of it

Day nine on our route runs Siem Reap to Battambang, a hundred and seventy-five kilometres, which is a short day by the standards of this trip and deliberately so.

The road runs south of the Tonlé Sap through flat rice country, and the interest is in the villages rather than the terrain. Stilt houses, fish drying on racks, the water buffalo situation, and in the wet season a landscape that is half water.

Day ten leaves for the 1500 Mountains and the terrain finally changes, climbing into the eastern edge of the Cardamom range and out of the rice belt for good. Battambang is the last flat day before the trip goes into the forest.

That placement is intentional. A hundred and seventy-five kilometres arriving early gives you an afternoon and an evening, which is exactly what this town needs and exactly what a tighter itinerary would not allow.

The Tonlé Sap, which is the reason for all of it

Worth understanding, because it explains the landscape you have been riding through for two days.

The Tonlé Sap is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia and it does something no other river system does: it reverses. In the wet season the Mekong rises so high that it pushes water backwards up the Tonlé Sap river into the lake, which swells to several times its dry-season size. In the dry season it drains back out.

That annual pulse is what makes this the most productive inland fishery in the world and what has fed Cambodia for a thousand years. It is also what fed Angkor, which is why the largest pre-industrial city on earth was built where it was.

The floating and stilted villages around the lake edge exist because of it, and the rice country you have been riding across is shaped by it. Dams upstream on the Mekong have been altering the pulse, which is a live and serious issue for the whole country.

Food, which is better here than the reputation

Cambodian food gets less attention than Thai or Vietnamese and it does not deserve the neglect.

Fish amok, steamed in banana leaf with coconut and kroeung, the lemongrass and galangal paste that underlies most Khmer cooking. Lok lak, cubed beef with a pepper and lime dipping sauce. Nom banh chok, a rice noodle dish with fish gravy that is eaten for breakfast and is one of the great cheap dishes anywhere. And prahok, the fermented fish paste that sits behind a lot of it and which is an acquired taste that nobody acquires in a fortnight.

Battambang has the added advantage of the return-migrant café culture, so you can have proper Khmer food at lunch and something entirely different for breakfast.

The rice country, which is what you have been riding through

Two days of flat green fields sounds like transit and it is worth knowing what you are actually looking at.

Cambodia’s central plain is one of the most productive rice landscapes in Asia, and it works on an annual cycle driven by the Tonlé Sap flood pulse rather than by irrigation. In the wet season the water spreads out across an enormous area and the rice grows in it. In the dry season the water withdraws and leaves behind silt.

What that means visually depends entirely on when you are there. In November the fields are gold and being harvested by hand. In February they are brown stubble with cattle grazing on it. In August they are luminous green and half underwater, with the roads running along raised embankments between them.

The stilt houses are the giveaway. In the villages around the lake edge the ground floor is empty and the living space is three or four metres up, because for part of every year the ground floor is a boat mooring.

Riding through it on a guided tour with somebody who can explain which stage of the cycle you are seeing turns two flat days into something considerably more interesting than the map suggests.

Season and heat

November to February is the window: dry, relatively cool, the country still green from the rains. March to May is punishing on the flat, with temperatures in the forties and no shade in rice country.

The green season from June to October has its advocates and they have a point: the landscape is spectacular, the light is better, and the Tonlé Sap is at its most impressive. It also turns the laterite roads in the northeast into something that requires respect, which matters more for the first half of this route than for Battambang itself.

The bats fly year-round. The temples are always empty. The heat is the only real variable.

The railway itself, which is quietly reviving

The norry exists because the national railway had collapsed. That has been changing.

Cambodia’s rail network, built in the colonial period, was wrecked by war and neglect and had effectively ceased to function by the 1990s. Rehabilitation has brought the southern line from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville back into service and reopened the northern line toward Battambang and Poipet.

Passenger services run, slowly, on a limited timetable, and they are a pleasant and extremely cheap way to move if you are not on a motorcycle. The freight function is the more consequential one, connecting the port to the capital and, in principle, onward to the Thai network.

That last connection is currently academic, since the Thai land border has been closed since June 2025 and the rail link across it with it. A line built to connect two countries is not much use when the crossing is shut.

For a rider the practical relevance is small. For understanding why the bamboo train moved to a purpose-built tourist section, it is the whole explanation.

Where the trip goes next

Battambang is day nine of fifteen, and what follows is the wildest part of the route.

Day ten runs to the 1500 Mountains on the eastern edge of the Cardamom range, and the country changes from rice to forest within an hour. Day eleven crosses to Koh Kong on the coast via Thmoda, on roads through the last large block of intact forest in mainland Southeast Asia. Then a rest day, then Chi Phat, then Bokor National Park and the old French hill station, down to the pepper farms at Kampot and the crab shacks at Kep before the run back to Phnom Penh.

The Cardamoms are the part that surprises people who thought Cambodia was flat and dry. Dense wet forest, elephants and clouded leopards in there somewhere, and a conservation effort trying to hold the line against logging and land conversion.

Coming to that straight from a colonial riverside town with a circus in it is exactly the kind of whiplash a good motorcycle tour should have.

Why this town earns its day

A fortnight in Cambodia has a lot of competition for its days. Angkor obviously. Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri for the riding. The Cardamoms, Bokor, the Kampot coast.

Battambang earns its place by being the one stop that is about ordinary contemporary Cambodian life rather than about ruins, forest or coast. It is where you eat well, walk a riverfront, watch several million bats and go to a circus run by people who taught themselves art in a refugee camp.

Riders who have done the trip tend to name Mondulkiri as the best riding and Battambang as the best evening. Both are true and the itinerary is built to have both.

Riding Cambodia for real

Our fifteen-day Real Cambodia Ride starts and finishes in Phnom Penh, unaffected by the closure of the Thai land border, and runs the Mekong at Kratie, the red hills of Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri, the empty north through Preah Vihear province and Koh Ker, a full rest day at Angkor, then Battambang on day nine before the Cardamom mountains, Koh Kong and the Kampot pepper coast.

Roughly two and a half thousand kilometres over fifteen days, a big biking tour in the proper sense, small group, road captain, tour guide, mechanic and a support vehicle carrying the luggage. Have a look at the 15-day Real Cambodia Ride or the Cambodia motorbike tours page. If you are weighing this against a Thailand motorbike tour and want an honest comparison of what each one gives you, message us on WhatsApp.