Thursday June 4th 2009 Siem Reap

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Thursday June 4th 2009 Siem Reap
The cocktails reaped a little revenge on our heads as we woke up. Finally dragged ourselves up at about 10am but heading out in the glaring sun to go on tours to the Angkor temples around Siem Reap. But that’s our job now so we swallowed it up and went to look for a tuk tuk to bring us to the temples.

We ended up asking the hotel guy how much we should pay and he organized a tuk tuk for us for $12 for the full day which wasn’t too bad we thought. The prick of a driver from the previous night appeared outside then and we thought the hotel had organized him but then another on e arrived and we headed off. First off we visited Angkor Thom, this is the biggest complex of temples, it’s in essence a walled in city where over 1,000,000 people lived during the 12 century. The exterior walls are still intact and within them are lots of temples scattered about. We fist went to Bayon, a massive sight, not exactly sure what its function was as we didn’t bother getting a guide or buying a book either. It looked very nice though! We saw a couple more of the buildings in that area with elephants carved on walls and what used to be a big pyramid but is now a mound of rubble that they are restoring. We then ran the gauntlet of avoiding all the vendors shouting lady, lady, cold drink, buy something, and sir sir you want a t-shirt sir. They literally start screaming at you from 100 meters away. Competition is fierce.

The next stop was the magnificent Angkor wat which is the sight that most people associate with Cambodia. It’s a singular location of a temple that I think is a giant tomb but could be wrong, our guide book had a couple of paragraphs on it so didn’t get much detail on it. Pretty amazing sight though, its weathered through the last 900 years pretty well. We got caught in a rain storm there for a while but nothing too bad, our luck with not getting too stuck in the rain is still holding out. The tuk tuk brought us back home then and we arranged to meet John and Sarah and their Canadian mate Fiona for dinner.

We met them and had some kymer food platters which were delicious and then wandered through the night market for a while laughing at all the tack they try and pawn off on you, the market are the exact the same everywhere except that they just embroider another countries name in the blank space. Headed off to the guesthouse then as for some reason we arranged for our driver to pick us up at 5am to go and watch a sunrise.

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