Whilst having dinner outside at a restaurant in Kratie, we noticed many people pointing and looking up at the night sky. One man then began "drumming" on a street sign. Thinking that we were in the middle of yet another strange festival, we ignored it and carried on eating. It was only when we looked further upwards that we realised they were getting excited about the lunar eclipse! Over the next 2 hours, we had a fabulous view of the eclipse in a totally cloudless sky.
(JH-In awe of the lunar eclipse Sarah forgot to mention the great food we had in the restaurant, the reggae music they were playing.. or the huge rat that ran past our table while we were eating!).
The next day we got the painfully early 7am bus to Siam Reap. Cambodia is a lot flatter than Laos with actual paved roads (with, of course, the obligatory pot holes...but fewer of them). This made for an infinitely more comfortable journey, and we arrived in Siam Reap in the late afternoon. (It should be noted that whilst bus travel is better in Cambodia the karaoke bus is sadly not just a Laos phenomenom! - again we were subjected to Thai bubblegum pop at full volume, with the words scrolling across the bottom of the huge screen at the fron of the bus. After a couple of hours or so of this (and just as I was praying for some improvement in the music quality... Steps or Bewitched would have been an improvement!)the music stopped abruptly and a seventies kung foo comedy filled the screen. It was as if Bruce Lee had got together with Benny Hill and produced this "entertainment". Regardless of our state of bemusement the Cambodians thought this was absolutely hilarious and the bus became a very jolly place!)
As soon as we got off the bus we were adopted by a tuk-tuk driver who took us to our requested hotel. We arranged for him to come back at 4pm the next day so we could visit the famous Angkor Wat for sunset.
The next day we wandered around Siam Reap and visited the Angkor National Museum to take in some information about the Angkor temples before our visit that evening and the next day. The museum is in a brand new colonial-style building and has a wealth of information......however our brains were ready to explode with stories of hindu and buddhist mythology (perhaps not fully explained to the westerners the museum catered to.....for ages we kept reading about the "churning of the ocean of milk". We had no idea what this tremendous event was! In the last gallery of the museum they informed us that it was what marked the beginning of the world).
Armed with this information we headed out to Angkor Wat with our tuk tuk driver (who wanted to be known as Mr Bond!), and he told us to climb the hill opposite to watch the sun set over the famous temple. Unfortunately, on reaching the top, we found that 5000 other tourists had also had the same idea and we couldn't get a space! On the way down we did have some magnificent views of the sun setting over the Cambodian landscape. Mr Bond was to arrive at 5am the next morning to take us to see the sun rise before the great temple.
That evening we wandered into downtown Siem Reap to get some food. We were very excited to see a restaurant offering "Cambodian BBQ" with snake as an option! We sat down and ordered a beer whilst perusing the menu, only to be told that snake was off the menu. Instead, we ordered kangeroo, ostrich, beef, chicken and squid and out duly came a platter of raw meats and a strange metal, table-top, dome-shaped BBQ with hot coals underneath on which we were to cook the meat ourselves. Despite burning a large percentage of it, what we did manage to eat was tasty!
You can guess what happened next......we both woke up feeling decidedly unwell at around 3am which then got progressively worse.....we had managed to give ourselves food poisoning with the do-it-yourself BBQ! We had decided to change hotels that day and drop our bags at the new hotel on the way to Angkor Wat, despite the early hour many Cambodians are up and around before dawn. Seeing as we were up at such an ungodly hour, we decided to go out to Angkor Wat anyway. We arrived and entered the pre-dawn gloom in front of the temple (again, along with 5000 other tourists!) and waited for the sun to rise. Unfortunately, cloud obscured the sun and we soon had to make a quick dash back to the hotel, where we remained in bed for the rest of the day :(
Feeling much better the next day, we lazed around the hotel pool and generally tried to avoid any BBQ food, and finally made it back to the Angkor temples the day after.
We first went to the fortified city of Angkor Thom. This was once the capital of the great Khmer empire around 1100AD. It housed around a million people, most of whom lived in wooden huts which have obviously now decayed but the grand stone buildings, the preserve of the king and gods, have remained. As we rounded a bend at breakneck speed with Mr Bond, we were rewarded with a wonderful view of the Bayon temple. This was built by King Jayavarman VII and is famous for its stone faces on the many towers, which highly resemble the great king himself, somewhat of a narcissist! We then wandered through the leafy city, taking in the royal palace, elephant terrace (a huge stone observation platform with many carved elephants from which the city's population could watch the various royal parades in the main square) and other impressive temples.
Then we went on to the temple which probably features in most people's idea of Angkor, Ta Prohm or the Jungle Temple. Apparantly, this is the condition of most of the temples when the European explorers first stumbled upon them.....huge tree roots engulfing the stone walls, passageways blocked by stone-falls and jungle plants growing wherever the opportunity allowed them. This was our favourite temple and you could really feel how those exlorers muct have felt when they came through the humid jungle and found the mighty structure.
Then it was back to Angkor Wat to properly explore....take 2!! The temple is really impressive, and is huge, it amazes us of the sheer effort required to built such a structure in the 12th century. The stone carvings which run all the way round the building on the first level had just been restored and they tell the story of how the world was created. Angkor Wat itself was built as a representation of the universe as it was viewed then: the central tower is Mt. Meru, the lower towers are mountains, the walkways are the continents and the surrounding moat is the ocean.
After a gluttony of Khmer history, we decided to head to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, the following day.
