We have just finished up 3 days in the 8th wonder of the world, Angkor Wat. The first day we sight saw (sight seed?) from 10 to sunset, 7 pm. It was a long day! We went to some of the smaller temples to work up to the more elaborate ones, which we saved for later.
The next morning we woke up at 4 am! By five we were in front of the main temple Angkor Wat (The whole area is just called Angkor Wat after the biggest temple) for sunrise. Unfortunately we weren’t the only ones, there were probably 500 other people there! There was a pool in front of the temple so you could see a great reflection with the morning pastels. When we were done we examined the incredibly intricate Ba Reliefs, stone carvings depicting battles stretching 100s of yards along the outside of Angkor Wat. We stopped for a breakfast of soup before we continued to visit other temples, some perfectly resorted and others remote and untouched, chocked with HUGE trees and thick dangling vines. I felt like I was in Indiana Jones! We were only up for a half day because it was sooooo hot (90 and sunny! This is the coldest time of year!) so we went back to our hostel to drink fruit shakes and swim in the pool.
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| Nick feeling mighty small! |
Yesterday we started at 7 and went back to Angkor Wat because we hadn’t gone inside. Nick was prevented from going up to the top of the building because he wasn’t old enough but he wasn’t missing much, everything up there was under construction. Next we went to Bayon temple, which is almost is big and a thousand times more detailed when it comes to stone work. There are at least 10 big stone towers coming off of it and each side has a giant stone face of the king on it. It’s really photogenic and the ultimate jungle temple. I can only imagine what it was like before tourists started coming, amazing!
I noticed that Angkor Wat had had wide open chambers and courtyards, but Bayon was different. It’s tiny narrow labyrinth of stone passages made it easy to get turned around. It was also nice because standing on the outside in some places you couldn’t see that the Buddhist temple was crawling with tour groups, because they were all hidden by stone. I think everyone was relieved to be done, we were “all templed out”.
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| Bayon Temple |
So, we decided to change it up by taking a drive over to the land mine museum. The establishment is pretty small, it was started by an ex child soldier who served many different sides in all the conflict that happened in Cambodia between the 60s and 2000s. He had learned to set up mines at age 10, so he knew how they worked and felt horrible for all the innocent farmers and children he had unintentionally hurt or killed with undiscovered mines. So, him and his wife just started going around disabling mines for free, they cleared 10s of thousands of mines in their work, and now they have a whole team sweeping for mines with the latest technology. It was really cool to learn about and I’m glad we went.
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| Some of the disabled mines on display |
Today we got to sleep in for the first time in a while. We will hang out at the hotel pool until we get picked up to go to our night bus. We will go across the country while we sleep and will wake up to be in Kampot. Kampot is down in the south of Cambodia and is a small village where Justin has friends that live there full time. I think we will stay there for a week or 2.
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