Angkor What?

Well we finished our first day of temples on our 3 day pass – so it was a toss up – do we do two in a row or do we have a ‘rest’ day. It was decided to go for it, and knock two off and then rest. So we called our lovely tuk-tuk driver and he rocked up for our 9am departure. We first went to Angkor Thom – which is a city spread out and contains lots of different ruins and temples. We enjoyed Bayon – there is so much history involved. Georgia became the guide and read the book to enlighten us on some of the more ‘relevant’ points. (Who said there was no school??)  This is the one that has lots of faces in stone. Time has taken it’s toll – there is lots of restoration work going on and some of the areas are ‘no go zones’. We loved how the light and lichen makes the faces seem to have more expression. Hence the happy snapper got a few more pics to add to the 200+ of the day before.

We climbed up and down and glowed profusely – but luckily it wasn’t as hot as Day 1. We walked up Elephant Terrace. Some of the temples have dress codes – shorts must be below the knee and shoulders need to be covered. We weren’t sure which ones these were – and it turned out Georgia had slightly shorter shorts on and we couldn’t get in to a couple of parts of temples. We then continued on and saw a couple of smaller temples – but still with the children incessantly  trying to sell anything from bamboo flutes to postcards, scarves, mangoes, cold water etc etc…. Our final destination was Angkor Wot – an amazing place. There were crowds of people there and many tour groups – mostly speaking in Korean and different European languages. Difficult when you are trying to eavesdrop and find out some of the finer points!! However Georgia had the book out and discovered all the gory stories about the bas reliefs on the walls. You need to know the points on the compass – and which way you are heading as everything has significance. We walked around for an hour and then decided we had had enough – templed out so to say!! Some wild monkey’s were a slight distraction – people were feeding them and giving them water bottles to drink.There were big queues to get the best view over whole of Angkor Wot so an executive decision was made. We have another day to go on our passes – so a rest day was in order and then on Sunday we will hire push bikes and return to the ones we missed and want to re-visit. No doubt there will be huge crowds again! An amazing piece of world history – and so ancient compared to New Zealand’s history. The people were very clever and amazing craftspeople who could design extremely well according to the landscape and environment.

Some carefully selected photos will be posted, when time allows!