Angkor Wat

9th of October

Our tuk-tuk driver, hired for the day for $11 introduced himself as 'Lucky'. (for a while i wasn't sure how he stumbled across this as his tourist name, perhaps some endearing childhood story where he found sometime after i saw a helmet make called 'lucky' and i assume His english wasn't great but he had a very warm character and the most innocent face i think i have ever seen. I had a much better feeling being in this tuk-tuk than the previous! We arrived at in total darkness and before we knew it our new friend was driving off and leaving us to trip and stumble towards what we only hoped was the entrance (it was in fact only the walkway in to the entrance, we didnt feel too stupid, it was pitch black, no one could see us!)

A shadowy Angkor Wat appeared before us and we set up camp in front of the water in amongst an a smallish array of tourists. As we waited for the sun, more and more people arrived to cramp our well chosen spacious picture sight. The final amount of people pitched up to watch the sun rise was surprisingly small and i was glad. There's only so much room you can make for Chinese and Japanese tourists and their love picture taking whilst posing in the foreground of sights! I thought i had taken a few good pictures and was a step above some tourists and their compact cameras until up waltzed some fresh looking westerner guy with a horrendously expensive looking cannon and a whole suitcase full of accessories. He was very keen to test out each of his glass filters, different lenses, adjust his tripod and just generally do all he could to make me feel like i shouldn't have even bothered! jealous, just a bit.

We started our route a little unconventionally by missing Angkor Wat initially to avoid the camera happy tourists we had just camped with. Lucky drove us around a couple of the sights dropping us off at the start, telling us the name and sometimes a little bit more information and we were left to our own devices to explore each temple. It was so hot that by 8am i was covered in sweat and looked like i had just been work a workout! We knew full well that a proper guide would have been needed to truly understand everything we saw, but seeing as though neither of us had a great interest in the history of the place we thought it was a luxury we felt we didn't require. The joys of travelling for a long period of time and on a tight budget!

Overall i must admit i was quite underwhelmed by the Angkor sights. Perhaps it was the fact that most of the sights and buildings weren't that old, not by European standards, or the fact that a lot did look just start to look the same, or that the intial historical interest wasnt there to being with. I did enjoy two temples which stood out by a mile. The first was called Ta Keo. The structure wasnt spectacular apart from the fact that it was vastly higher than anything else. There were 4 or 5 flights of steep steps you had to literally rock climb up to gain access to the top of the temple where pretty good views were to be had. Slightly less fun was the careful assent to the bottom! The second temple sight was where the first tomb raider was apparently filmed. For how long and how much was actually used i do not know, but suspect it was rather minimal. However, this was the only temple not cleaned up and left as it might have originally been found which gave it so much more character and atmosphere than any of the other temples. It was only tarnished by sets of paths that had been newly added. Clearly designed for the lazy American tourist or older Chinese female tourist groups in mind, which Cambodian officials had decided could not be trusted to make it round the sight without becoming confused or getting lost.

By 3pm we were all templed out. With Lucky's agreement that as the weather had turned a bit and was now very cloudy, sunset would pretty much be nonexistent, we headed back. We had made quite an effort to ask Lucky a lot of questions as he was ferrying us about the different sights and we were surprised as he made a detour to take us to a small Killing Fields memorial which was a good bonus but even more so as there we met his older brother, also a tuk-tuk driver. We spoke for a while as his english was quite a bit better than his younger counterpart and he gave us more information about his family and Lucky, learning english from tourists alone and what killing fields was about. I regret not taking a picture of both of them together.

We said our goodbyes to Lucky and tipped him, which to my knowledge is the only tip we have given so far on our trip. We were packed up for our night bus and headed out to feast on our last night of street food. We had a really enjoyable time in Siem Reap....we weren't to know things were about to change considerably!