My almost 3 weeks in Battambang were a misery for several reasons, listed below for my catharsis:
My airbnb, which looked shiny and new in the pictures, was one of the smelliest, stinkiest houses I’ve ever endured. It absolutely reeked of fruity vape smoke, cheap perfume, sweat, and sex. The stench was so bad that I ripped off the bedding, threw it in the worst smelling room, closed the door, and slept on my own pillow and body towel (which I had luckily brought along) on the bare mattress– at least the mattress was new. I also went straight to the shop, bought two cans of aircon cleaning foam, and even after using both up on the single working aircon, the stink was strong enough to hit me every time I entered the house from outside, and bother me much of the time I was inside. It was really unbelievable for a newish looking house to stink so abominably. It was not the stink of messy prior guests. It was the stink of trashy whores living like that for months or years. The upholstered furniture was also so visibly filthy I refused to sit on it, perching myself on one vinyl covered stool I thoroughly wiped down with a clorox wet wipe.
Despite the property ostensibly being fenced in on all sides, one morning I woke up to hear the back door opening. I immediately got up and started shuffling towards it, which must have scared off the intruder, who ran away without even closing the door.
The neighbors were absolute trash. At least every other day they played unbelievably loud bad music for unbelievably long and late hours– one Saturday during Pchum Ben, they played very very loud (I’m estimating 85 or 90 db inside my bedroom) shitty booming bass dance music for 13-14 hours straight, no breaks, from lunchtime until 3 in the morning, coupled with a rotating rainbow strobe light that shone directly into my kitchen/living/work space. They smoked the nastiest shit imaginable at all hours, and burned their trash every few days, and of course the shitty construction standards of the airbnb meant I was wearing a mask and closing the curtains (denying myself much needed sunshine) most of the time, to avoid breathing it in as best I could, but still had serious difficulties in the already stank house. I don’t know why I even hope for better, considering I’ve never lived anywhere in Cambodia where at least one neighbor isn’t ruining everyone else’s quality of life (and at this point I’ve had 4 apartments, 4 houses, and umpteen hotel stays). It’s amazing, really; no matter how far into the countryside of Cambodia you go, the neighbors are equally and unbearably loud, smelly and antisocial.
4. The shit neighbors were not just trash, they were trolls– almost every day, sometimes twice a day, I’d find my running water was shut off, and had to walk through the front garden, unlock the front gate, exit the property, climb up onto a little mound made of tile shards, and turn it back on. There’s no way it was an accident, or caused by an animal or someone trying to get water– It’s a large blue handle that is parallel to the pipe in the off position, perpendicular to the pipe in the on position, and there’s no faucet. This continued throughout my stay. I’m guessing the nasty neighbors are also xenophobes/racists who just don’t want foreigners around, because a) obviously they are the rude, disturbing neighbors, not me (I’m not home most of the time, and when I am, I’m quiet, and I obviously don’t burn anything, litter, or otherwise bother anyone) and b) I never complained or even cursed out loud about their absolute shit behavior, so it wasn’t personal.
5. The shit construction and 2 inch gaps around all the doors also meant endless bugs in the house. I was lucky I came prepared with my mosquito bat, because I had to make extensive use of it. Between the mosquitos and the bare mattress and the stinky aircon, I was sleeping every night fully clothed, including hood, socks, and mask, often in the heat. Was there a fan of any sort anywhere in the house? Of course fucking not. But the worst bug didn’t come in through the gaps– it crawled up through the shower drain– a fucking scorpion! I was lucky I opened my eyes while shampooing my hair, because it was heading towards my foot fast when I noticed it. I sprayed it as far away from me as possible with the shower head, grabbed the cup I put my tooth brush and paste in, and tried to spray it into a corner/against the wall with my right hand and catch it under the cup with my left. The edge of the cup came down on its middle, unintended but perhaps lucky– I ground it into the floor with the cup as best as I could, which while not enough to assure it wouldn’t crawl out, gave me time to run to my luggage, naked and wet, grab my boxcutter, and slice through it around the edge of the glass, killing it. I think in the end that was better than the original plan of just leaving it trapped under the cup until the owners of the place found it. According to a bit of later research Cambodian scorpions are not deadly, just painful like an XL hornet sting.
6. The commute was much longer than I expected– a 25 minute or so tuktuk ride into the city each day, made longer by needing to call for a driver and getting cancelled on at least once or twice per trip. In addition to slowing me down and costing more than double what it should, this made delivery from restaurants impossible, which became a huge problem because . . .
7. The house didn’t have a kitchen as pictured. Not only were the pictured full size fridge and cooktop missing, so was the aircon in the living/kitchen space. There was what I think is a drinks cooler, or maybe XS fridge for beauty products– it was much smaller than even a hotel minifridge, so I couldn’t refrigerate anything beyond a single box of leftovers and 1-2 canned drinks. So, I ended up eating things I normally wouldn’t– boxes of dry carbs like crackers and cookies, and takeout meals left on the counter for hours.
In addition to just being miserable and non-nutritious, I think I learned the hard way about fried rice syndrome. I think I got VERY VERY lucky, only taking one bite of leftover rice before remembering it had been sitting out for two nights without refrigeration. I’ve had genuine food poisoning once or maybe twice, somewhat easier but still appalling “Bali belly” a few times, and this was not those– it was the worst gastro event of my life by far. Only googling around days later did I learn about fried rice syndrome for the first time, and recognize the symptoms/severity/progression. I truly believe I’m only alive because it was only one bite AND I always carry around antibiotics, just in case.
Experience has taught me to take antibiotics early into a food poisoning or Bali belly type gastro episode; if they help, great; if they don’t, oh well, at least they don’t hurt. So, within the first hour or two of misery I took a double dose of clindamycin I had on hand completely coincidentally (thanks asshole Siem Reap pharmacist who pretended to not know what a UTI was/shamed me for having one/insisted on selling me a pointless generic antibiotic that probably wouldn’t cure a UTI because I had ‘wasted’ his time explaining my ailment and thereby reminded him of his incompetence), and taking action early could (or not, I don’t know) have saved me. Apparently clindamycin is one of the antibiotics that helps with fried rice syndrome, though not a first line med.
The pain was so strong, the fever so high, and the diarrhea and vomit so unrelenting that I put my pillow on the tiled bathroom floor; there was no time to walk the perhaps 6 feet from bed to toilet, and my balance was failing. I’d experienced that before with food poisoning; the difference this time was that during my previous worst episode, 6 or 8 hours into it coming out both ends I was thinking “Force yourself to drink this water, drink, drink, drink; if this vomit/diarrhea doesn’t stop in 5 or 6 more hours, we’ll (my physical and mental selves) go to the hospital”. This time, I was in too much pain/too weak and dizzy to even crawl 5 feet to find/see my phone to call a hospital, certainly physically unable to exit the house or enter a vehicle unaided, and that’s not even accounting for the language barrier.
No one reads my blog anyway so I can be graphic; in the last few hours of the episode, I was no longer vomiting or defecating excrement, I had none left; just lots of congealed blood. I knew rationally it was probably related to internal hemorrhoids/strain but it was still terrifying, moreso because I had no one and no way to call for help; thankfully that aspect resolved within 24 hours. I spent the next 3 days bedridden, the first 2 still sick/sleeping, and it took maybe a week to fully recover.
8. Speaking of food, even at restaurants in town, it was expensive and bad, extremely ironic given Battambang has been honored by UNESCO for its culinary heritage. At the heroically priced (and Angelina Jolie patronized) Maison Wat Kor, the food is bland and inauthentic, catering to the insulting stereotype they maintain of a European palate. At the one American-owned restaurant in town, the windowless, fanless toilets face directly onto the dining room, and the staff leaves the doors wide open to air out the shits everyone hears everyone else take where we eat. In what tripadvisor rates the best restaurant in Battambang, supposedly social enterprise/french-khmer fusion/wine bar, there was a fucking longass manicured thumbnail in my food– you know the type, usually seen on taxi drivers who do drugs– clearly accidentally half chopped/half ripped off by a cook not wearing gloves, who then chose to leave it in my food. And when I complained and showed it to the waiter, they called over the manager, who not only did not apologize or comp a thing, but lied to my face in a totally absurd manner, telling me I was confused and it was just a piece of cooked garlic! The audacity!
I’ve learned through countless conversations over my year plus living here that Cambodians have an unfathomable, bizarre, totally fucked, cultural predilection for casual lies and gaslighting– they think it’s unclockable, socially/morally acceptable, or both; they all do it, and they always try it if they have even the slightest chance of gaining even the smallest thing by it. But even more maddeningly, they often do it when they have nothing to gain except the chance to smile smugly at their sabotage and feel for a moment they’ve gotten the best of someone; in fact, they seem to consider maintaining irrational fantasies of their own superiority and control the most valuable benefit. Out of hundreds, thousands? of these micro-aggressions, in every transaction and most stakeless interactions, this fingernail debacle is just the most succinctly illustrative example I’ve experienced to date. How shameless must one be to suggest to my face that I, an over 40 woman, have never seen or bitten either a piece of cooked garlic or a fingernail before, and can’t easily identify them independently or in comparison, and have somehow mixed them up? Even if he got the word wrong and meant ginger, or galangal, or some other root or spice stiffer than cooked garlic, the notion would be absurd. How insolent must one be to assume I, an over 40 woman, better than him by any standard that matters– wealth, class, intelligence, education, age, experience, morality, manners, self-awareness, fairness, generosity, pride in a job well done, overall success, positive impact on the lives of children, charity work, political activism, number and variety of languages spoken and cultures witnessed, hell, even knowledge of his own country’s geography, history, and heritage, and based on his behavior, though perhaps counterintuitively given this sentence, modesty, speaking of which, I bet I even fuck better– would or should back down when confronted, especially so directly, with bullshit that insults my intelligence? In New York only small children or personality disordered imbeciles attempt these sorts of lies; I understand the logic of ‘can’t knock ‘em for trying’, but can’t help but feel repulsed.
I often wonder how this became an acceptable norm. What proportion of Cambodians tell each other that foreigners are stupid, or women are stupid, or middle-aged people are stupid, or rich people are stupid, or it’s a combo, or it’s just something about my face, or just do a little test and see for sure if I’m stupid, or if they insult each other’s intelligence this way too. It seems like they are constantly taking my foreignness for foolishness, my kindness for weakness, my generosity for profligacy, my curiosity for naïveté, and my manners and standard American friendliness as a psychological need for their approval/validation/friendship. I know my contempt makes me sound racist, and to be honest, dealing with this so often from so man different Cambodians has made me reconsider nature/nurture. On one hand, I’m very aware and admiring of the Khmer who once wrote better Sanskrit than the Brahmins; on the other, I’ve repeatedly experienced exactly the combination of middling intelligence and moral turpitude that could have been predicted 40 years ago when they genocided a full third of their population, literally everyone with a heart, brain, or franc, and their whole families with them, as insurance against future generations with any of those things.
Anyway, to end this rant still talking about food . . . even at chains/franchises that are supposed to be relatively safe (like Domino’s pizza and Gloria Jean’s coffee) the food smelled strongly of mold– like they saw it, decided they cared more about making money than their customers’ health, brushed it off literally and figuratively, and sold it anyway. Just so fucking nasty in every way. I think in the whole town there was a single coffee shop I liked.
9. The weather sucked and the temples were all locked. Despite feeling ill and exhausted, I was getting up early and dragging myself around, as expensive as that got, trying to see the important temples. It rained every fucking day for over two weeks, and not a single temple of note was open. The only temple interior I saw the entire time was that of Wat Kor, which I stumbled into just because I happened to be walking down the street, on my way to that hotel restaurant that wasn’t worth eating at anyway. It was obviously only left unlocked because, unlike the others, they don’t usually get tourists. It’s all just so ironic and again, xenophobic and insulting; foreigners didn’t loot the temples of Cambodia singlehandedly, every single theft for the past century plus was by locals who made a living selling out their own material culture and artistic heritage. Designating some temples as tourist friendly then locking them, is crazy.
10. My macbook air screen cracked in Battambang, and I was charged $300 for a supposedly authentic apple replacement screen, and forced to extend my stay in this place I really didn’t like while the repair was made. This ended up just being the first in a series of costly tech failures: the doubtless counterfeit replacement screen failed within a month, costing me another $300 to replace back in Siem Reap; that second doubtless counterfeit replacement screen just failed again this week (thankfully this time I’m still in the same city and can utilize the shop’s 3 month warranty); for the cherry on top, my iphone screen also failed within 48 hours of my returning from Battambang, a known bug in iphone 13s.. Between apple’s planned obsolescence and the cambodian culture of fakes and scams, I’ll have spent between $2000 and $3000 I don’t really have to replace broken tech with even lower quality less reliable tech by the end of the first quarter of 2026.
11. The only nanoplated thin silver lining of all this is that now, as I edit pictures like these of Wat Phi Pit– bad uninteresting photos I went to great lengths and expense to take– my unhappiness at their poor quality has forced me into improving my editing skills a bit and investing (albeit money I don’t have) in a) backup tech, so I’m not out 2 weeks’ income next time a computer component fails and b) a better camera phone, when I can afford it– I can’t right now, and that’s why these blog posts are coming out in relatively quick (for me, anyway) succession– nothing to do for the next few months except hang around and edit photos of travels past.
12. On the bus rides there and back from Siem Reap, I was tortured by stinky smokers. On the bus ride back, the smoker was also very obviously ill, constantly coughing, sneezing, and hacking (with mask worn under his chin rather than over his nose and mouth); of course he was not refused service, and of course I came down with whatever respiratory illness he had within 48 hours of arriving back in Siem Reap.
If I had not been traveling with a fucking camper kit of supplies (antibiotics, exacto knife, mosquito bat, pillow, towel, masks, hoodie, socks, more than a few hundred bucks in the bank) I cannot even imagine how exponentially worse my misery would have been, everything already sucked so much. I still prefer a lifestyle of constant travel to any other lifestyle, but cities/weeks like this try my patience and make me deeply sad.
As for Wat Phi Pit, otherwise known as Piphetthearam Pagoda, I can’t find any info about it except that it dates to the 19th century and was built by the Siamese, which is visually evident.
I did at least learn something new when looking up old pictures of it– many of the photos from EFEO labeled April or May 1964 are in fact reprints from old plates, and that’s why they have what I thought to be anachronistic, but is in fact original, hand lettering. These photos of Wat Phi Pit, for example, are actually from March 1924.
I suppose I also know that at some point their original Buddha was looted or destroyed, because while the current one (shown here in a google maps photo being regilded) is a close copy, the draping fabric details are not present in the original.
