Advertisement
Published: March 22nd 2007
Edit Blog Post
Angkor Wat - Sunrise
Worth the cold and early morning. By 7am you start sweating. Thurs 22nd March: Well we got up at 4.30am and set off at 5.30am. Got to Angkor Archealogical Park and paid the $20 for a 1 day pass (A 3 day pass is $40)
Angkor Wat, it's a truly amazing place and we saw loads in one day, the whole 16km short circuit in fact. We'll try and keep the writing as short as possible because it could go on forever and put lots of nice pictures. The places we visited are in chronological order.
Angkor Wat Got there at 6am just in time for sunrise. It was very busy and getting the right shots from across the moat is very difficult but the patience payed off. We walked up to the centre of it and climbed right up. I say climb, there are stairs, but you need to use your hands to pull you up aswell (Matt isn't great with heights which was scary for him). At the top we caught the end of sunrise which was beautiful. It's one of those unforgetable experiences. Descending we used the west staircase because it has a metal hand rail, although you do have to go down backwards and use
your hands aswell.
Phnom Bakheng We just stopped for a picture
Baksei Chamkrang Again, just for a quick snap
Then we stopped for a bite of breakfast, where a kid managed to sell us two flutes/recorders for $1. After that we headed up to:
Angkor Thom Angkor Thom is actually a city that once housed just over 1 million people. It's big. Inside it we saw:
1. The walls
2. The Gates
3. Royal Palace
4. Phimeanakas
5. Terrace of the Elephants Which is a really amazing Bas-relief
6. Terrace of the Leper King Which is simal to the above
7. Bayon With all the Gopura, 4 sided heads.
8. Prasat Suor Prat (12 Towers)
9. Baphoun After leaving Angkor Thom by the Victory Gate we went to:
Chau Say Tevoda which was closed, because with French funding it's in the middle of restoration, and
Ta Keo Thamannon and crossed the bridge by
Spean Thmor finally arriving at Ta Prohm
Ta Prohm is the temple with the trees growing into it, which was used in the 'tómb Raider.' film. It was very photogenic, but was swarming with Japanese tourists which made taking some pictures almost
a farce.
Bantey Kdei was next, shortly followed by
Sra Srang which was in reality, just a flat plateau of stones overlooking a lake. There some kids gave us free bamboo bracelets and managed to persuade us to buy some water and a can of coca-cola.
Prasat Kravan where Leanne stayed in the Tuk-tuk and Matt went for photos. Finally arriving back at about 1pm-ish.
The thing about angkor Wat is you see so many temples and they're all so big and well spaced apart (Their all about 2 or 3km apart from eachother) that you begin to get them all mixed up in your head, and can't remember what you saw where. As a photographer it was sensory overload. We only did the smallest circuit, but some temples are nearly 40km away from the entrance, so you can imagine, it would take at least a good month solid to see everything.
So we got back, decided to see how much DHL would be to send stuff back to the UK (Gifts, clothes etc.) as our bags are getting fuller and heavier by the day. (We are seriously considering getting an extra backpack between us, but the big
The Stairs
Alot of people were panicking going down these, Leanne was like a monkey and had no problem, Matt broke into a cold sweat rucksack and the extra daysack we both bought is quite heavy enough). Anyway, to cut a long story short DHL is $70 dollars per Kilo. Way out of our price range. So we went to the market, bought some tacky souvinir gifts. Then found a supermarket, had a burger, got deodorant etc. mundanities.
On the way back we arranged for a tuk-tuk tommorow to take us to a stilted village, the crocodile farm and the landmine museum and some other place (his English was a bit poor, but far better than our Khmer.) and then we just came here and did blog as we hadn't done it for 2 weeks now, sorry folks. By the way it's 10.30pm and it's taken us 3 and a half hours to update this blog. Please read it all. We're very tired, and it's a lot of effort, and it costs us $0.75 p/hour.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.168s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 7; qc: 56; dbt: 0.0672s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb