In the north west of the country, for over six hundred years, a mighty civilization held sway.
Then one day, everybody left and it was forgotten about until some machete wielding Frenchmen
stumbled upon the Khmer temples of Angkor.
We spent two nights in Siem Reap, allowing us a full day touring the temples with our personal guide
and tuk-tuk. We took in Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, the Bayon and Ta Prohm amongst others. The area
is very big and you would be doing very well to walk around the whole place! It is a UNESCO world
heritage site, and a single day's entry was 20 US dollars.
Perhaps the most famous view of Angkor, this is the core of Angkor Wat, one of the larger and
better preserved temples.
There were plenty of monkeys wandering about the place, but don't get too close!
On the path up to the main entrance of Angkor Wat, having walked over the causeway across
the moat which surrounds the whole temple.
Good views from the top of Angkor Wat, across the lush jungle. Unfortunately we didn't have
time to jump in a balloon.
A nicely framed shot through one of the high-level windows in Angkor Wat.
Angkor Wat is particularly well known for the hundreds of metres of bas reliefs about its
galleries, depicting scenes from Hindu battles and mythology.
Detail of a window of Angkor Wat, with stone framework mostly intact.
The entrance to the city of Angkor Thom, complete with the ubiquitous smiling face
above the arch.
An interesting method being employed to keep this tree vertical. And the local motorbike
wash.
Within Angkor Thom, the Bayon looks somewhat messy from a distance. It was used during the
filming of "Tomb Raider", the time which introduced Angelina Jolie to South-East Asia and led her
to start adopting the kids here and in Vietnam.
It remains a mystery who or what these faces represent, but there are over 200 of them
in the Bayon, all smiling serenely and mysteriously...like they know something we don't...
Phimeanakas, also in Angkor Thom, built over a thousand years ago, makes a nice photo!
Banteay Kdei, newer than the Phimeanakas but over 800 years old nonetheless, it is surrounded
by water carpeted in green algae.
Getting the hard sales talk from the locals... Who's nose is that in the top right?
I was most interested in the temple of Ta Prohm, it being the one which has had very little
effort applied to extract it from the jungle. The trees find the stonework very useful for rooting
into, spectacularly pushing the temple to pieces.
Part of the fascination with Ta Prohm must be the feeling you get when wandering around
like you were the first person to discover it, the next Indiana Jones!
This tree is like some sort of alien monster, reaching and snaking through the temple.
Back in the town of Siem Reap, there is not a lot of action happening. This is the
imaginatively named "Pub Street", lined with restaurants and bars, and yes, even pubs. We had
an excellent dinner at a Khmer place called "Family Restaurant".
One of the most popular bars on Pub Street, the "Angkor What?" bar, where each visitor
signs their name on the wall. We found some space near the toilets and did likewise, but the next
day when we came back they had started building a brick partition across it. The pub was still
open though!
The road to the airport, our introduction to Cambodia when we flew in from Bangkok. This
is us leaving, moments before we had been overtaken by a very important looking motorcade, a serious
of blacked out SUVs flanked by gun-toting soldiers waving us minions into the gutter. I wonder who that could
have been?
