Angkor Wat / Siem Reap - Cambodia: 9th October 09

This morning we got up at 4.30 to see the sunrise over Angkor Wat, the largest religious complex in the world. We arrived at the temple about 5.30 and found a nice quiet spot to sit. The temple is unique in that it faces West - all the others face East - so it’s the only one that has the sun rising behind it. Unfortunately we’re at the end of the rainy season, so there were lots of clouds - no spectacular sunrise for us! It was nice watching the clouds get lighter though. I had a couple of slices of left over pizza for breakfast and Matt and I trundled off to explore the temple. It really is huge, which is great because we did have quite a few times when it felt like we were on our own.

After Angkor Wat, we went to Angkor Thom, a huge city complex and walked around the temples and terraces. The main temple has 50 towers, each of which has 4 Buddha faces, very beautiful.

The next temple we visited was Preah Khan, it’s different from the others as it’s made up of dozens of long corridors and courtyards, a great place to explore. Apparently Anjelina Jolie filmed Tomb Raider here. I think this one was my favourite.

We stopped at a couple of smaller temples and then finished at Ta Promh. This temple is famously still covered in trees, so looks like most of the other temples did when they were ‘re-discovered’ by the Europeans in the 1850s. It looked like a fairytale, really pretty. Because we’re at the end of the rainy season, everything is green and lush, so it was a great time to see this particular temple!

At 1pm we’d seen enough (we’d been going since 5am remember!). So we spent the afternoon chilling in the hotel and both had 2 hours of massage – blissful!

After that, we went to the hotel’s bar for happy hour and met a new friend. Shirley is 30 and from San Francisco. Her grandparents are from Taiwan. She’s a really good laugh – with such a potty mouth that she makes Sharazed look demure (yes, really!). We went out for drinks and also met a guy called Gareth, the chief vet at Sydney zoo, who spends his time inseminating elephants and operating on tigers! After a couple of cocktails we all went our separate ways but will meet up tomorrow for happy pizza. Yay!