[Siem Reap, Cambodia] Yeah its a cheezy title, Sim is better at coming up with them than I am.

WARNING – The next few posts have hundreds of photos

Anyway, it was an awful start to what turned out to be an awesome day. We both woke up grumpy. Me because I had the start of yet another cold and had had little sleep due to the rattly aircon. Sim because he had had a frustrating, but ultimately successful (thankfully) evening before, trying to recover all our Mekong River and Phnom Penh photos off of the SD card which for some unknown reason decided to freak out on us. Sim suggested we take a lazy day but we had agreed to meet our tuk-tuk driver at 8am and I was being stubborn.

Our first stop was at the ticket office. We were thoroughly impressed. There were loads of officials very politely directing people to the right que and our 3 day photo id passes were printed out within seconds of us handing over the cash (40USD per person) and standing in front of the camera.

Next up was the main attraction, Angkor Wat. It’s what everyone comes here to see. We had a bit of a brain fart when we inadvertently accepted incense at the entrance and got suckered into rubbing a statue (Vishnu I think) for luck to find they were hitting us up for a ‘donation’. They were looking for 10 dollars – cheeky! I gave some of my Cambodian Rials to avoid too much embarrassment. Guess it was a vengeful god as about 10 minutes later our camera battery died, and we discovered that the spare was flat too. We, and by we I mean Simon had forgotten to charge them the night before. In his defense though, I was supposed to have reminded him. There was no point in carrying on if we would not be able to take pictures to remember what we had seen, so we had to headed back to the hotel to kill a few hours while the camera recharged. We were both really upset with ourselves for having wasted half a day of our passes.

We headed back out just after lunch and saw everything at Angkor Wat before the post lunch tour buses arrived. Actually the crowds were not bad. I suspect it gets a lot busier later on in the year judging from the size of the carpark outside the Wat. The Wat itself was everything we expected. Surrounded by an impressive moat which dwarfs every English castle moat we have seen. We walked around the galleries admiring the detailed bas reliefs before exploring the interior. A lot of restoration is going on but the bulk of the complex was free of scaffolding.

We moved onto the Angkor Thom complex, passing through a gate with a massive four-sided face atop it. Very cool. The walls were also surrounded by another massive moat. There were a number of different sights within the Angkor Thom complex, including the Bayon, the Baphuon (closed for restoration), the Elephant Terrace and Leper King Terrace plus a number of smaller ruins that we did not bother with.

After all this clambering over and around half restored, mostly crumbling but all just amazing ruins, it was starting to get late. We headed over to the Bakheng Temple to catch the sunset. The LP and Travelfish guides both say that this is a good spot. They both warn about the crowds though. We thought they were mistaken about the view but spot on about the mayhem that was hundreds of people all trying to get up on top of the temple to catch the sunset. After getting to the top and seeing the disappointing view, we decided that sunsets were overrated and headed back down via the elephant trail. Yes, you can ride an elephant to the top if you want.

Tired and thoroughly pleased with the way the day had turned out, we headed back to our hotel. Topping off the day, we found that the staff at the hotel had decorated our bed with flower petals arranged in a heart. It was very sweet of them and we are glad we stayed here on our Gibbon friends’ (Jessica and Christian) recommendation.

More Angkor tomorrow…. Yes please!

[Pictures: Us at Angkor Wat, we made it ! The Bayon Temple, Sim fooling about on Phimeanakas. The crowds on Bakheng]

– Posted from my iPhone via WiFi