Cambodia has awesome temples, but it also has beautiful countrysides—and one of our favorite activities in Cambodia ended up being a bike tour through the green and verdant countryside around Battambang.

Battambang is the country’s second biggest city after Phnom Penh, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it upon arrival. It has a very small town feel, and we could traverse the city center in less than 20 minutes by foot. And while the city is pleasant to walk around, from admiring the French colonial architecture to perusing the food and goods for sale in the central market, a lot of Battambang’s appeal lies in the countryside.

So we signed up for a bicycle tour through Butterfly Tours, a business founded and run by local university students. A large part of their mission is to provide students with business experience—to become “employers rather than employees” in the future—as well as an avenue to practice speaking English. It was inspiring to see how Butterfly Tours promotes an entrepreneurial spirit among young Cambodians who want to build a better future for themselves and the country.

The other part of their mission, of course, is to introduce foreigners to local Cambodian life and how people in the countryside make a living. Exploring these different livelihoods provided the structure of our six-stop bicycle tour.

First Stop: Rice Paper. One woman was continually spreading out the rice flour liquid over the heat, and the other woman carefully picked it up when ready to spread out on these bamboo mats. Once the mat was full, they would lay them out in the sun to dry. Rice paper is used to make spring rolls (yum!).

Stop Two: Dried Bananas. This family spent their days thinly peeling bananas and laying them out on sheets to dry in the sun, producing a tasty and sweet snack. They also made banana chips and banana cakes, and most of the bananas they used come from the trees in their yard.

Stop Three: Rice Wine. I expected it to taste like sake, but it’s much stronger! Cambodian families drink this for special occasions and at parties. Pictured here are the ingredients for what goes into the yeast, including several spices and some chili peppers.

Stop Four: Rice Noodles. This was the manual grinder the family used to prepare the rice flour for noodle-making. We didn’t get to see it in action, but we did get to eat some fresh noodle soup!

Stop Five: Dried Fish and Fish Paste Market. We could smell this place long before we could see it. Our tour guides shared that many locals don’t actually buy their fish paste from here because of sanitary concerns, but the paste does end up in city restaurants…

Stop Six: Bamboo Rice Cakes. These are hollowed-out bamboo sticks that are filled with sticky rice, beans, jackfruit, sugar, and salt, then roasted over a fire. It was a yummy way to round out the morning!

All of these stops were family-run enterprises, with production occurring at their own homes and in their front yards. A few used a middleman to sell their goods, but most just subsisted off selling directly to neighbors and the occasional tourist.

After the tour, Vikram and I talked about how different all these livelihoods are from what we’re familiar with, both in our personal experiences and in America more broadly. At home, I worked nine hours a day in a temperature-regulated office with a variety of projects to work on and as-needed coffee breaks. Here, the people we met spent nine or more hours a day working in the heat and humidity doing tedious, repetitive tasks. At home, we were able to save enough money over a couple of years to afford this year of travel. Here, it’s hard to imagine that they make enough to make it day-to-day comfortably, let alone save too much. Overall, it reminded me of how thankful I am to be learning about different work and lifestyles on our travels, as well as how lucky we have it back home.

Travel Notes:

• Butterfly Tours operate in Battambang, Kampot, and Siem Reap. We did the “Traditional Livelihoods” tour in Battambang and the “Backroads of Kampot”, each costing us $18 per person. (Cambodia uses USD.)
• Both tours lasted from around 7:30 am to 12 noon and included yummy snacks from the various stops.