With a day to spend in Battambang before the boat ride, I hired a tuk-tuk driver to show me two of the local attractions:  the bamboo train and the Prasat Banan temple.  I didn’t know much about the bamboo train, and based on the little bit I’d read I was picturing elaborate bamboo rail cars linked together to form something resembling a real train.  It turned out to be a group of individual rail cars made of simple bamboo flatbeds that rested on two sets of metal wheels.

Apparently the French built the narrow gauge track in the 1930s.  Regular trains stopped running during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and now it’s only used by the bamboo trains.  The operators make money by selling rides to tourists as well as locals who use the trains to transport a variety of cargo.

The rail line has only one track and traffic goes both ways.  When two trains meet, one of the operators disassembles his train and lifts it completely off the track.  It takes less than a minute.

In the late afternoon I climbed up to the Prasat Banan temple.  Built in the 11^thcentury, it resembles the towers of Angkor Wat on a much smaller scale.  After seeing the massive, majestic Angkor temples, however, it was tough to get appropriately fired up about such a tiny place.  Perched on the top of a hill, Prasat Banan is sold as an ideal spot for sunset-watching, but a larger hill to the west blocked an important part of the horizon and interfered with the view.