Ankor Wat

Sunset from the deck of our $3 a night digs in Phnom Penh.
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Got into Siem Reap this afternoon at 1pm. An unbelievable number of touts meet you at the bus stop... all tuktuk drivers trying to get you to hire them to bring you into the city. We almost couldn't get off the bus, it was crazy. Our guesthouse from Phnom Penh called ahead(normal procedure) to give their partner guest house our names. So, there was a driver waiting there holding a sign with our names, to whisk us to the partner guest house. It ended up not being too bad, so we decided to stay there. Walked around a bit in the afternoon--we're melting!! It's crazy hot here. Then supper from street vendors. After supper we headed out (along with the rest of the tourists in this city, it seems), to see the sunset from a temple in the Ankor complex. A temple at the top of a hill. It was really beautiful, and worth the hike up, despite the number of people who were doing the exact same thing, and also despite the litre of water we each sweat out.

All the people we watched that first sunset with. Popular spot we found!
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Tomorrow is Ankor Wat day. Our day starts at 5:30 so we can see the sunrise, and will finish around 6pm after the sunset. So, I'm finished for now--so tired!... I'll update again in a few days!!

A few days later... So Ankor Wat. As big as they say? Yeah. As impressive? Yah. What a great day. It started at 5am when we woke up to go see the sunrise. As we jockeyed into position with almost every tourist in Siem Reap, it was quite a sight! Left Ankor Wat(the main building) and went exploring elsewhere for the next few hours. Saw a lot of rocks, and lot of trees, and not as many tourists as I expected. I think because it's such a big place, there's actually enough room for everyone without it being too crowded. We hired a tuktuk for a day, so we were able to spend as much or as little time wherever we wanted. We meandered around for hours, looking at buildings, climbing up everything with stairs(and some without). It was a blistering day. We made up for that by drinking more than 3 litres of water... each!! We've done pretty well with not getting sunburn/sunstroke so far. Let's see if we can keep it up! We went back to Ankor Wat(the big building with the three cones on top) in the afternoon for our last few hours... What a crazy building that is. When you think about how much rock that is, and how much time it would take to do all the shaping of rocks, let alone carving!!! The main building has "galleries" of stories etched into the rock, the whole way around(that's 800m of carvings). It's mind-blowing. Hard to grasp, really. I mean, who just wakes up one morning and decides to commission the building of something so huge. Apparently at one of the temples(the one that's totally overgrown with trees now), according to the wall(carvings!!) it took over 80 000 people just to maintain the building. AFTER it was built. How does your mind comprehend numbers like that?? I guess you can see why they're letting the jungle take over! Towards the end of the day we picked out spot(near the top of the big guy) to watch the sunset, sat down, watched for 10 minutes, then got kicked off (closing time). One of those times when I wished I had enough money to just say, "how much do you want to let me stay up here until the sun is down?". It would have been worth a lot. Still really impressive, even with the sun high... Needless to say, that was an early night to bed...around 9pm, I think!

The sunset our first night in Siem Reap--when you buy a ticket for the next day you can go in that day to watch the sunset.
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I'm going to let the pictures speak for me on this one, no more words...