Angkor What?

That terrible pun doesn't originate with me; actually it's the name of the first ever pub in Siem Reap. It's still there, scribbled notes from travellers all over its walls.

I met a girl called Jacquie the first night there and we agreed to get up before dawn the next day so we could get to the temples and watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat. I naively imagined that doing this would avoid the crowds, but I don't think this would be the case even normally and certainly not during Khmer New Year. After getting up at 5am and getting a tuktuk there, we discovered we were in the company of around 100-200 people. I took a bunch of photos but due to the low light it was hard to get good ones. Also I don't think the scale of the place really came through. What you should bear in mind looking at these photos is that the main towers are a fair distance back from the front of the building.




Aside from the iconic Angkor Wat, there was one other really impressive temple called Angkor Thom. It's covered with huge numbers of towers bearing slightly different stone faces on each of their four sides. From what I could glean from the Japanese-authored information boards (the Japanese have a team there doing the reconstruction work) nobody exactly knows why they're there, but the prevailing theory is that having recently been shocked by an invasion from a neighbouring people, the Khmer built a temple that called upon the power of all four religions which they knew about. Pascal's Wager writ large.




After Angkor Thom, the rest was diminishing returns, featuring progressively less impressive temples. By 10:30am (which to be fair was 5 and a half hours after we left the hostel) Jacquie and I had both had enough and we left. I didn't ever head back. I'm glad I saw them but I didn't need more time. I didn't do anything else major in Siem Reap. I wandered the town looking at the local markets and so forth, I entered a quiz night with a couple from the hotel - we came 3rd out of 6 or 7 teams which was a pretty good effort considering we only had three - other teams all had five or more. One day I went out bike riding with a Californian girl going by the very American name of "Betsy". We didn't make it far as it was viciously hot that day, 36 degrees, humid, and mostly clear skies with a very hot sun belting down. Luckily the hostel featured not only a pool, but $1 pints of cold beer. Good times.