Temples Galore

---

After 2 days of bus journey from Banlung (I never left my hotel room in Komphon Cham as I was felling too ill, so can't tell you anything about it!) we arrived in Siem Reap. Its a bit of a different experience to the North-East of Cambodia, with more backpackers, more touts, more kids selling postcards/books/pineapples/cans of drinks, more tuk-tuk drivers and definitely more temples.

The first afternoon we took a walk around the town, sent some e-mails and arranged what we'd do for the next couple of days.

On Monday and Tuesday, we spent our time visiting the temples of Angkor - by bicycle on Monday, and Tuk-Tuk on Tuesday. These were the most impressive temples I've ever seen - and not by any small margin - they are unbelievably impressive. It's impossible for me to express the scale of them, but I could easy spend half a day in some of them (many people go back several days to the same temple as there is so much to see). They are dotted around the countryside here, and several are about a couple of kilometres apart from each other - we saw maybe a dozen of them - there are many more temples from this era found further away which we didn't visit.

Anyway, they were built between the 9/10th and 12th centuries (I think!) by the King's of the Angkor empire - well, by the people who lived under their rule. This page: wikipedia has informnation and links to some good photo's of the temples of angkor.

We are a bit templed out today, so are taking it easy before we make the journey back by bus to Bangkok tomorrow - its supposed to be a bit of a nasty road, so not looking forward to it too much. Still, we'll be in Hong Kong on Saturday (we are flying out of Bangkok) where we'll meet with Stumpy and Smiffers for 2 weeks of climbing action - woohoo!

Oh, if you want to see other (better) pictues of angkor (or of my travels in general) you can take a look at Chris's blog site:

Chris Blog

---

Photos

The trees are out of control!
At 'Ta Prohm', one of the temples of Angkor the temple has largely been left in the condition it was found - meaning that massive tree's emerge menacingly out of the temple itself

Wall carvings
The walls of Angkor Wat (the most famous temple) are covered in 10's of thousands of these carved figures (mainly from the buddhist/hindu epics)

Bayon Faces
Bayon, another of the temples at Angkor contains dozens of these cracked, massive faces.