Going full tourist at Siem Reap and Angkor Wat

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The trip to Siem Reap was an 8 hour boat trip along the Sankae river and across Tonle Sap Lake. There was some beautiful scenery once you left the main built up area, with lots of bird life and fantastic floating villages. The boat was packed with lots of people heading home for the Khmer New Year the following week. As we approached each floating village the boat would blow its horn and lots of canoes would come out to meet us to pick up passengers or supplies from town. It was a pretty efficient process with people bailing out the sides of the boat without warning, passing babies and bags of baguettes. The Tonle Sap lake is the largest in SE Asia and fills during the wet season when the Tonle River flows from the Mekong into the lake. During the dry season the Tonle River reverses direction and the Lake drains back out into the Mekong. When we arrived at the Siem Reap stop, we were accosted very VERY quickly by tuk-tuk drivers wanting to take us into town (about 8km). They literally jumped into the boat, scanning for any foreigners and practically sat on us to 'claim us' from the others. It was a pretty hilarious spectacle.

Siem Reap is a town like no other in Cambodia. It could very well have been transplanted from the touristy part of Thailand, with a plethora of bars, restaurants, hotels, spas and shops. The main square in town even has a Pub Street (its actual name), selling 50c draught beer and fairly overpriced meals.

The next day we enlisted our enthusiastic tuk-tuk driver from the boat trip to take us around the temples of Angkor Wat. We started at 8am, and visited a total of about a dozen temples. It was a fantastic day but very tiring! Even though we were being driven between each temple site (between 5-10 minutes), the heat was as unbearable as usual, and combined with a few sets of stairs we were pretty stuffed by the end of the day. The temples are a true sight to behold, and to state the obvious, they are just so old!! (approx 11th century) We finished with the grand finale of the temple of Angkor Wat - amazing and totally packed with tourists. Given this is the low part of the tourist season I can't even imagine what it would be like in peak season... I think the day would entail hours of lining up to get an initial ticket, see what you want to see and get back to your hotel again.

We felt we had seen what we wanted of Siem Reap, so we managed to get a ticket back to Phnom Penh the next day as we had a few contacts to meet up with... little did we know we would then be stuck in Phnom Penh due to the New Years celebrations (officially the 14th, 15th and 16th April, but pretty much extending a week either side of that). This has put the rest of our plans for exploring north in Cambodia off for present, and it looks like we'll be hot-footing it up to the Laos border as soon as we can.

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