The country’s second city and its arts capital, with the finest surviving shophouse architecture and rice fields starting at the edge of town.
Battambang is what people mean when they say they want to see Cambodia without the crowds. The riverside streets have the best-preserved French colonial and early-modern shophouses in the country, and there is a real contemporary arts scene built around Phare Ponleu Selpak.
Out of town, the countryside is the attraction: bamboo train rides, hillside temples, fish paste and rice-paper workshops, and Phnom Sampeau, where a column of free-tailed bats pours out of a cliff cave every evening at dusk.
The killing caves at Phnom Sampeau are a Khmer Rouge memorial site, and are visited in the same afternoon as the bats. It is a strange, affecting combination.
Hire a driver for a half-day countryside loop rather than ticking sites off individually — the villages between them are the point.
November to February. The countryside is greenest from August to October, when the rice is high.
3–4 hours by road from Siem Reap and 5–6 from Phnom Penh. In the wet season a slow boat runs to Siem Reap across the Tonlé Sap.
Millions of bats stream from a cliff cave nightly around 5.30–6 pm.
A bamboo platform on train wheels, now running as a purpose-built ride near Banan.
The arts school that trained the Siem Reap circus performers; catch a show on campus.
A five-towered hilltop temple often called a miniature Angkor Wat, up 358 steps.
Street 2½ and the riverfront hold the best shophouse rows in Cambodia.