One night bus later and we had left not so sunny Sihanoukville for Siem Reap - home of Angkor Wat. I think this deserves its own blog entry as it was as amazing everyone said it would be there.
Before we went I thought it was just one huge temple but there is actual Angkor Wat Temple and then a whole complex of ancient temples in the jungle surrounding it which were forgotten about for hundreds of years after the ruin of the Khmer and Cham Empires and only discovered again in the 1900's by French explorers. It's so huge there that we had to spend two days there being driven around by Tuk Tuk to see it and even then we didn't see it all.
We started with actual Angkor Wat, getting there to see the sun rise over the towers and across the lake / moat that surrounds it. Inside was all still in tact and huge with amazing, intricate stone carvings on every wall. On our last day there we climbed up in to the roof where you can see just how huge the towers are and get an idea of the scale of it.
Even though this is the most famous of the temples every single one we visited was incredible. If you could block out all the groups of tourists (not so easy as a lot of them were wearing matching fluorescent tracksuits, bright red hats etc and doing bizarre poses on every monument in their path) and the tarmaced roads connecting each temple it was easy to imagine you were just trekking in the jungle and had stumbled across them because there were jungle noises wherever you were and every temple except for Angkor was partly in ruins with whole corridors blocked by massive pieces of rubble and incredible carved pillars just lying in pieces on the ground.
One of the temples had massive stone faces in the pillars while another one had huge tree trunks just growing through the rock. Apparently this was where they filmed tomb raider which didn't mean a lot to me but judging by the poses going on in this temple I think it did to a lot of the tour groups. This temple had a room in it with walls covered in what looked like drill holes. Being a bit too influenced by Indiana Jones I thought it must have been some kind of closing walls torture chamber but managed to eavesdrop a tour guide telling the group that in every single hole there used to be a precious jewel, like an emerald or a sapphire. One of the temples we saw was covered in these so I can't even imagine how amazing it used to look.
Unfortunately I can't do justice to it either by writing about it or with the hundreds of pictures I took that all probably look the same but it was a really amazing experience and a very good way to end the triangle of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. All that remains now is to make the most of the 50 cent beer before we fly to Malaysia - apparently land of excellent food but very expensive alcohol.
