Siem Reap & Angkor

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Angkor Wat, the pride and joy of Cambodia and the eighth wonder of the world is located at Siem Reap. Angkor is everything here - it is on the flag, it is the beer, it is brand names, it is the name of every second hotel on every street in the country, we are very excited.
The lovely people at Tat had booked us into their brother’s guesthouse in Siem. Smileys is a great place to stay, it’s a hotel with hostel prices and we have a tuk tuk driver at our beck and call. He takes us to see the sunset over Angkor but unfortunately the rains start and there is no sunset to speak of but we get our first glimpse of the temples and are entertained by a very angry monkey terrorising anyone who goes near it. I didn’t get my rabies shot so I’m steering clear. Equally angry are the bunch of kids selling tourist crap who we are trying to avoid. You buy something and the rest of the angry mob are shouting “What about me? What about me?”

We make our next date with the tuk tuk driver who will be meeting us at 5am the next morning for a sunrise start to our day of temple trekking.

We watch the sunrise behind Angkor with a cup of tea and a plastic seat. Its a good spot by a lake so the reflections make for good photographs. Seeing the famous temple silhouette in real life is awe-inspiring Then we’re off exploring the inside for the next hour until the tuk tuk driver collects us to take us onto the next one.

The temples (I can’t remember the names of each) are nothing short of amazing. This is Indiana Jones land. I have two favourites - the one with the hundreds of faces carved into the stone and the one that the jungle has taken over.

The guy who built the faces temple (Bayon) had 200 odd identical images of his face sculpted into the stone. Ever get the feeling someone’s staring at you? It’s brilliant. You can climb up, move through tiny doors, climb down into shrine areas and generally get lost in a stone labyrinth that this temple is.

My second favourite is Ta Prohm, is a crumbling temple taken over by the forces of nature. Huge tree roots have broken through the stone in the past century in a dramatic fight between man and jungle. The trees now tower high above the temple and deliberately very little effort has been made to renovate the buildings. It’s an incredible sight. The trees look like they might come alive at night like a scene from a horror movie, scary, but above all very, very beautiful.

The Temples of Angkor are plentiful and we had been warned via some article that a common condition called Not Another Bloody Temple Syndrome can often get tourists down. Yes much more common than sun stroke or malaria. We all suffered by the end of the day - Joel stayed in the tuk tuk for the last one. Also exhausting were the kids constantly trying to sell things between temples (not inside them thankfully). We spent all our money on bracelets, postcards and the like and when we tried to fob them off by telling them this we were called liars and told not to come back unless we had more money. Not very nice. The kids went to school half the day and spent the other half at Angkor, tough yes, but hard to feel sorry for them. We shrugged it off but would hate to think it might lessen the experience for some people.

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