Templed out

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We had an early start to watch the sunrise at Ankor Wat. Like all things around here, it was crowded and we were perhaps lucky to find somewhere to sit outside the temple precinct itself. While we sat waiting bus loads of tourists arrived and trooped across the causeway and by the time we decided it was time to follow the whole of the complex seemed to be full. They disappeared pretty quickly once the sun came up and we had much of the place to ourselves. I think Sammy would have been keen to do the whole thing over again, but I had no intention of wasting time and by subtle body language (i.e walking the opposite direction!) persuaded her that we should go and have breakfast.

She talked me into one of the scruffy little cafes under some trees within the temple where we set off a bit of an argument between the touts for cafes 5 and 6 (or was it 3 and 4?). Sammy seems to like to tease would-be vendors, be it children on the street or waitresses in restaurants. Obviously they’re very keen for the money and their menu prices are (to them) absurd so they’ll quite happily reduce prices by 50% to get the custom. The more competitive cafe owner got Sammy’s attention, even though the less competitive one had originally found her 50 yards away. Anyway, we both ordered some pancakes and ended up with those horrible American things that have the consistency of a cake but still taste like batter. Fortunately it came with some banana so it was just about edible.

Our next stop was Preah Khan, a relatively large temple dating to the late twelfth century just north of Ankor Thom. This was one of the few in the guide book (which I’d perused overnight) that sounded interesting and was famous for its “hall of dancers”, an area filled with carvings of dancing apsaras. Some of these made for good photo opportunities in the early morning light. However, after the day before I’d now had enough of temples. I had suggested to our tuk-tuk driver that the Western Baray, a large man-made resevoir would be an interesting alternative and maintained that we should go there despite his protests that it would be better to go to another temple (and associated facilities in which he presumably had some financial interest) some 15km further north. He managed to make the journey just as long by taking us on a convoluted route around to the other side, even though we had been very close to it to start with, but the price of the morning’s activities had been agreed in advance so it didn’t cost us any more.

The resevoir itself is partially dried out at one end, but it has remained (usually) full of water for 900 years, which I thought was quite an impressive feat. It also conceals pre-Angkorean ruins, possibly dating to the bronze age, under the murky waters.

After returning to the hostel we changed to go swimming at a pool listed in our guide books. As usual we ran into the same old nonsense about it being closed or the water being dirty, but eventually got a tuk-tuk to take us out to a perfectly nice little place called “Aqua” hidden away on the other side of town. It was run by a British bloke who ran the place like a pub, except it had hammocks instead of armchairs, a swimming pool instead of a fire in the hearth and two baby crocodiles in a small pond instead of a yappy dog. It was fairly quiet, there was plenty of shade for the sunloungers and the background music was agreeable so all-in-all a very relaxing place. We had a bit of a swim to cool off, tested my underwater camera, ordered some food and generally lounged around for the whole afternoon avoiding the heat of the day.

When we returned to the hostel we changed again to visit the Angkor National Museum, but due to an error in the guide book we found we only had an hour to rush around this surprisingly modern facility. On the way back to the hostel on foot we stopped to have dinner on “pub street” once again.

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Photos

Sunrise at Angkor
Cliche maybe, but it was quite pretty

The sun behind the temple
Taken amid thousands of people jostling to get the same angle