The Temples of Angkor & Angkor Watt?

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We turned up in the city of Siem Reap where we had arranged for a relative of the owner of the last guest house to collect us from the bus station, when he did collect us he asked if we wanted to have a party at his home. (To be fair it sounds a trifle weird but I think it’s just the language barrier and translation issues). We arrived at his house which was just a one or two room bamboo hut, in a terrace with about 7 others. There was a large circular table laid out and his wife was cooking on the bbq grill outside. Let’s just say the food was a mixed bag, some was good like the pepper noodles and the home made beef and lime omelet, but some was horrid, it was like raw chicken feet and ankles. I tried some out of politeness but could not bring myself to eat any more, despite the rice whiskey cocktails that were being thrown around.
We had arranged for this chap to take us to temples at 8.30am the next day, but before that we persuaded him to hand over the keys to his brother and come and have a few drinks in town with us.
The next morning was quite a struggle to get up and out of bed, but when we did we found our friendly tuk tuk driver there waiting for us, asleep in the back of his tuk tuk. He drove us out to the temples, the first one we saw was the largest and most famous, Angkor Watt, this hugely impressive temple is about the size of a village and every single wall has detailed masonry work. The scale of this temple unbelievable and it is completely surrounded by a moat, and everything is at perfect right angles.
We then went back to the tuk tuk for a ride to the next temple and found our guy asleep again, it was then he admitted his hangover, no sympathy from us as he was the one dishing out the rice whiskey like it was going out of fashion.
The rest of the temples were impressive but nothing like Angkor Watt, although there was a jungle temple which had massive roots of trees arching over entrances, I’ve seen quite a few temples now and this jungle temple was very different to the rest, which is why it gets a mention.
We were only in Siem Reap for a couple of days and we had bought our bus ticket back to Bangkok, turns out the bus forgot to pick us up so we were loaded into this car (a normal car with 5 seats) with this young family of three, a mother and her child, this other bloke and the driver, with Sam and myself that’s a total of nine people in this car for the 181km trip to the Thai border. Once we got to the boarder we managed to get on a proper minibus to Bangkok.
I would love to show you photos of the Angkor Temples visit, but we had a little problem with the memory card in Sam’s camera, hopefully it can be fixed but for the minute, we are photoless for one of the key parts of our trip.

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