Well, you may or may not know, but Siem Reap is famous for Angkor Wat and it's neighboring temples. So basically, we spent the last couple of days seeing temples. However, before our sight seeing, we rolled into town on a Saturday, so we decided to have a night out on the town. We hit up Bar Street - which is a street lined with restaurants, bars and a couple dance floors. It's apparently where you find the social scene in Siem Reap - a street thriving off of tourism and catering to the Westerners. We actualy bumped into our friend, Sam, and made a new friend, Patrick from LA, and the four of us did a little dancing at Temple Bar. It ended up being a late night, considering we were meeting our tour guide at 8:00 a.m. But hey, you're only young once!The next morning, we met our guide, Rith, who spent the day with us in the hot-hot sun, wandering the temple grounds and teaching us all about the structures and the Buddhist and 
Hindu carvings on the walls, that contribute to making these temples so intricate and beautiful. Having a guide was essential - it helped give more meaning to everything - rather than just an old building on the side of the road. It was a full day though. We started with the gates at Angkor Thom, went on to Bayon, where there are 216 faces carved to form this temple - plus detailed carvings on the walls to display the way of life of Cambodians in the 12th Century. It took us several hours just exploring the grounds and hearing all about the carvings.
We went on to Ta Prohm, which is the temple where Tomb Raider was filmed. I liked this one a lot because much of the stone has begun to crumble and the large roots of trees were growing over the temple walls.
Hindu carvings on the walls, that contribute to making these temples so intricate and beautiful. Having a guide was essential - it helped give more meaning to everything - rather than just an old building on the side of the road. It was a full day though. We started with the gates at Angkor Thom, went on to Bayon, where there are 216 faces carved to form this temple - plus detailed carvings on the walls to display the way of life of Cambodians in the 12th Century. It took us several hours just exploring the grounds and hearing all about the carvings. We went on to Ta Prohm, which is the temple where Tomb Raider was filmed. I liked this one a lot because much of the stone has begun to crumble and the large roots of trees were growing over the temple walls.
And then of course, near the end of our day, we explored the famous Angkor Wat. It was beautiful and impressive and quite the spectacular structure to see. However, after a day in the heat and battling thousands of tourists for the "best" photo opp, it was all I could do to pay attention to our guide - telling us more about the carvings of gods and demons, immortality and re-births. And did I mention that two of the five towers are currently under construction - just our luck, huh?! Look at those sweet green construction tarps in the pic below. :)
So we wrapped up our day touring temples and we spent the next day just hanging out in Siem Reap. We ate some tasty pastries at the Blue Pumpkin (yum yum!) and did some shopping at the local markets - Cambodia has great silk! On our third day in Siem Reap, we got up at 4:30 a.m. to venture out to Angkor Wat for the sunrise. We took breakfast with us in our bags so that while all the other tourists went back into town for breaky, we could tour Angkor Wat by ourselves (more or less) and take the type of pix we'd been hoping for. It was nice - we wrote in our journals and ate breakfast in the morning sunlight, with Angkor Wat as our backdrop. Does it get much better than that?! 
1 comment:
Somewhere in the afterlife, the people who built Ta Prohm are rolling over in their graves as you refer to it as the "place where Tomb Raider was shot."
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