Cambodia: Siem Reap & Angkor

After Phnom Penh was Angkor, the ancient capital of a huge prosperous empire dating back to before 1400 which included most of Thailand and Cambodia.

It is located at the town of Siem Reap (which means Siam (Thailand!) Defeated). A $10 luxury bus trip (with hostesses and all) got us there. We managed to find accommodation in this busy tourist town in a hotel that wasn't quite open yet for business. We had to come back 20 minutes later while they put together the beds! The main reason for the droves of tourists that come here is for the sights at Angkor, although Siem Reap isn't too bad itself. We ate some really good food there, but were also reminded by the countries past and its poverty by the many begging land-mine victims and children.

Our swiss hotel owner found us a driver for a whirl-wind 1 day tour of the sights at Angkor. All the guidebooks we consulted said a day was never going to be enough and that at least a week was needed to take it all in! I dunno, I had seen enough ruined temples after a long day in the heat, but some of the more remote jungle ruins are supposed to be amazing and then it is also more about the surroundings and the adventure. The main sites we visited were host to throngs of tourist groups bussed in from all over the world (mainly Japan it seemed at times) who were jostled from site to site after the mandatory photo opportunities. We were disciplined enough to leave our hotel at 5 am, in order to witness the sun rising at the most famous of angkorian attractions, Angkor Wat. I wasn't that impressed, and all my photographs were awful because there was hardly any light, or cluttered with large groups of tourists. The temple is ginormous and I didn't get a sense of size until we got closer and it was quite amazing.

The buildings at Angkor are basically large (some huge!) man-made hills. Because of the lack of various architectural/physical techniques the buildings lacked true three-dimensions. There were no rooms-above rooms or large contained rooms. Here Meli disagrees with me! She says: the point of these structures isn't to have rooms, it's to be visually stunning and they act as giant sculptures themselves very intrictaely sculpted.. not man-made hills anyway!

Ok so maybe I was a bit harsh, a lot of the work was very good and showed hard work, devotion and amazing skill and art. On top of the many large structures you also have to imagine in all the palaces and houses that made up the surrounding city. Building in stone was reserved almost entirely for temples, while everything else was made of wood, and has long since disappeared. Also, we did have a really nice day scrambling all over the buildings! We climbed with difficulty and trepidation up some of the steeper "stairs" leading to the summits, and wondered what on earth you were supposed to do during the rainy season when they would be extremely slippery.

Lucky for us it didn't rain till the night, and boy did it rain! By the morning we were on our way back to Bangkok, but as it turned out, the roads weren't really suitable for wet weather either... The usual 3 hour trip to the border took about 10 hours, all the while slipping and sliding, getting stuck in the mud, waiting for other cars/vans/busses/trucks to come unstuck. We were travelling side-ways for quite a bit of the journey! And all this in an outsized minivan packed with 28 people (and all their luggage!). We were very glad to bet back onto the roads in Thailand.

Pictures up soon.