Siem Reap district Banteay Srei features giant puppet parade this year Asia News Network (ANN) is the leading regional alliance of news titles striving to bring the region closer, through an active sharing of editorial content on happenings in the region.
If a giant tiger or a five-headed Naga walking down the street doesn’t make you look twice then not much will. You can see those and other wondrous sights at the giant puppet parade in Banteay Srei district of Siem Reap this April.
A short ride from the erstwhile capital of the Khmer Empire, once-impoverished Preah Dak is now the model village in a visionary campaign to bring ecotourism to rural Banteay Srei.
The Phnom Kulen mountain range provides a backdrop to the 35-hectare lake at the heart of Song Saa Reserve. (Photo: Ralph Renouf)
On a bright Sunday morning in Siem Reap, I jump in the back of a
remorque for an excursion into the countryside of northwestern Cambodia. Riding along with me in the motorcycle-pulled cart is an effervescent tour guide named Mony Leap and a couple of her clients. A rural road takes us past tidy farmhouses and rice fields glimmering with wet-season rain, the bucolic scenery tarnished only by the belching exhaust of trucks as they overtake us. This is my first trip to the village of Preah Dak since moving to Siem Reap 18 months ago; itâs also the first time that Leap, who grew up in the surrounding Banteay Srei district during the Khmer Rouge years, has led a tour there.