An early start, up at 04.00 ready to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat. Sip has turned up in a jacket – apparently it’s ‘cold’ this time in the morning, despite being well over 20 degrees C! We head over to the temple and even beat most of the security we’re so early! We cross over the moat at around 04.45, we need torches to see anything at all. We cross into the main courtyard, ready to pick a spot Sip has got selected already as the best – and find that we’re pretty much the first ones there! We sit down and power down the torches and it all goes pitch black – our eyes get used to it fairly quickly and we can see the silhouette of the temple against the night sky – it’s very magical and peaceful, though this will change soon enough... Within 15 minutes or so others start to arrive, starting with smaller groups. 15 minutes after that the big groups start to arrive and shatter the atmosphere completely, shouting, waving torches around and generally behaving like ignorant cocks. We feel they might be doing this as a tick-in-the-box rather than for the experience it should be and it certainly diminishes things for us. Without wanting to introduce xenophobia to this blog, big shout downs go out to Malays, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans and Russians – please stay away next time. It’s actually a long while before we start to see the sun come up – maybe 06.15 or so, and we’re in the perfect spot to see the first orange glow. Unfortunately, cloud cover is a bit heavy so the colours are mute and it’s the wrong time of month for the sun to come up directly behind the central towers of the temple, but it’s still special. We move past the thronged masses and move round to the side, towards the ponds to get a reflection of the temple while the light is good and the water still. It’s hellishly busy though to my mind, I guess we’re several decades too late to experience this perfectly.
It’s still early but we head off fairly quickly towards another smaller temple that’s a distance from Siem Reap – Banteay Srei (“Citadel of Women”). It’s a 32km journey, but well worth it – the temple is very small and until the late 1990s still had minefields surrounding (and through!) it, but it dates back to the 10th century and is built completely from pink sandstone and has the most beautiful, meticulous and amazingly detailed carvings – easily the best of any of the temples and in staggering condition given that it’s more than a millennia old. We’ve arrived early so there are only a handful of people who’ve beat us to the place and this is a good thing – it’s very photogenic and it would be very hard to appreciate its beauty when filled by the masses – Sip’s made a good call with this one. We head off just as the first of the big coaches start to arrive and see many many more pass us as we head back towards Siem Reap – we timed that well! We journey back via another temple, Pre Rup, but after the morning we’ve had this is fairly unremarkable and we don’t even venture inside.
We’ve decided that, give this is our last day in Siem Reap we’ll finish early and we’re actually back in time for breakfast, then a snooze before heading into town to sort bus tickets to Phnom Penh and the usual scouting around. We find a great Khmer restaurant for lunch (and end up having dinner there too!) and are so utterly impressed by the Khmer food we’ve had so far that we dig out details for a Khmer cookery school in PP – if we get any idea how to cook the noodle soup it’ll be money well spent!
Siem Reap is a great town, the temples are amazing, the food is great and Cambodia is shaping up to be a place we wished we’d visited much earlier – we’re starting to regret not leaving our travelling schedule a bit more flexible than we did, it might have been nice to head down to the coast and spend a few days there – maybe next time!
