The shadow of Ankor

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where are we gonna land...its flooded!!
this crappy little plane that i have become used to from flying to the isle of man so many times is going down as if to land but all we can see is flooded fields..still suffering from jet lag & not sure if i was asleep or awake we hit the tar...seems there was a lane big enough to land on!

we step off the plane and bumm we are just hit by the heat, ive never felt heat like it. we meet our tuk tuk driver, a 18 year old lad who worked for our guesthouse with the longest & sickest finger nails ive ever seen - he later became known as horse.

out on the the dust track that is the main road! first thing that shoots past us at about 15mph is a long piece of wood with what looked like a lawnmower motor stuck to it, this was pulling a trailer with about 25 men women & childeren in it, i look to the other side where theres a mad looking cow walking towards us...we head on down the "main road" at nice slow pace, it was perfect & exactly the relaxed lifestyle i wanted to see after the madness of bangkok....think im gonna like it here

it was a sunday....i think, the day i left dublin was the day i stoped looking at dates & asking for the time - its been one of the best things of the trip! so sunday afternoon, our first day in cambodia & we set out to explore the town of siem reap, this has to be one of the nicest & most chilled out towns in the world...againg after bangkok it was great - the tuk tuk drivers lay sleeping in their tuk tuks or playing football in the streets waiting for you to aproach them for a lift.
the bars & cafes are all open front with chilled out music & no one seemed to be in any hurry at all! i had no idea of what to expect from these countries i was about to visit but i got a great feeling after that first day in siem reap.

so once again we find the irish bar, a habit we would have to loose! in for the spuds & a bit of grub that would remind us of mammys cooking, a few pints the of to the cot, we had an early start of 12pm to start checking out the temples of ankor wat.

the temples were unreal, hundreds of huge stone temples spread over miles, horse brought us to see 5 temples on the back of his motor, 1st was bayon - the one with the faces carved in the stone, second was the jungle temple - the one that was used in lara croft tomb raider, we saw 2 other temples then we saw the beast, ankor wat, the biggest thing i have ever seen! we have been told this temple is one of the 7 wonders of the world....no wonder!

wet met an english girl sheree in our guesthouse, she is doing volentry work in a school near by, she showed us where we could find a pool & some late bars so we spent the next few days chilling by the pool by day & skulling buckets in the ankor what bar at night. we also visteded a land mine museum which thought us a lot of the problem that is land mines in cambodia & a lot of other parts of south east asia.

sieam reap is a gem & was a super spot to get the trip going!

next stop phon pehn

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