Siam Reap and Angkor Wat

These two places are the most significant places in Cambodia if you are interested in old temples. Siam Reap is the tourist town that feeds the people into Angkor Wat. More on Siam Reap later.

One of the smarter things we have done, and we haven’t been that smart in our travels, was take a local taxi in from Siam Reap’s new airport to the main centre and our hotel. During this 45 minute ride we got talking to the driver and ended up negotiating our schedule for our 5 day stay. We’re only on our second day and so far our arrangements are working.

We headed out to Angkor Wat this morning at 0830hrs and visited only 2 temples, Preah Khan and Preah Neak Poan . We decided to start our exploration starting with the smallest and visiting the biggest and main temple on the third day when we plan arriving for sunrise at 0600hrs!

What we were not prepared for was the scale of Angkor Wat. The immensity of this old civilization is awe inspiring not only in its complexity but also in its size. It’s truly awe inspiring and clambering through the ruins and seeing the work that went into building the temples boggles the mind at the amount of resources that were needed to bring this place to reality. It is actually the worlds largest religious building. There is absolutely nothing to compare in its scale.

I don’t do it justice with a few photos but I can only say that if ever get to this area of the world stay and enjoy this place.

The picture above is Mr. Met, our driver for the next 4 days. The jitney we will buy off Mr Met at the end of our trip and bring back to drive tourists through Oak Bay!!

Tomorrow? Another day digging through temples. I won’t say the whole day because we ourselves are old temples and in mid 30 degree temperatures we’re almost done by 12 noon and plan on retreating to some air conditioned facility to ourselves to some cold umbrella drinks. See you tomorrow