Hi everyone! This will most probably be my last posting until we return home. We arrived back in Hanoi last night from Siem Reap and we take an overnight train up to Sapa in the mountains tonight. We are taking it easy today in Hanoi as we both are exhausted from all that we've been doing the last few days. We slept in a bit this morning and didn't really HAVE to be anywhere today.
The temples in and around Ankgor Wat were absolutely amazing - something I've never experienced before. On Sunday we rented bicycles for $1 each for the day and rode out to Ankgor Wat, about 6-8 km from the center of Siem Reap. The temple of Ankgor Wat was our first stop. We parked our bikes and were instantly surrounded by several kids hawking guide books, water, postcards and bracelets. "You buy from me." "I remember you from yesterday." "What's your name?" "Where are you from?" "America...capital is Washington." No matter how many times you say no, thank you, they keep on persisting. These kids are at pretty much every major temple. It's unbelieveable though how good their english is and you sometimes end up having little conversations with them. You want to buy everything from them too because they are so cute and friendly. But, it also gets increasingly frustrating.
As we were walking across the bridge over the moat to Ankgor Wat we had a monkey walking along with us - the first one I've seen outside a zoo! We saw several more throughout the day - the Cambodian people feed them, so they're pretty tame.
Besides Ankgor Wat, we saw several other temples the first day - Bayon, my favorite as the detail and size of it were unbelievable; Phnom Bakheng, a 15 minute walk up a large hill with view of Tonle Sap lake, the jungles in the distance and THE place to take sunset photos of Ankgor Wat although we avoided the crowds and saw it in the middle of the day; Baksei Chamkrong, Baphuon, Royal Palace, Terrace of the Elephants, etc., etc., etc. The detail and vastness of all these temples is jaw dropping. It's just unbelievable how preserved many of them are (the earliest ones were built in the 900's)and how practically every service is covered with carvings of some kind.
On Monday, we rented a car with driver to take us to a couple of the outlying temples - Kbal Spean, about 50 km from Siem Reap where we had to hike about 30 minutes up to a small river/waterfall. The carvings were mainly in a 75 meter stretch of riverbed; Banteay Srei, about 30 km from Siem Reap, and then 4-5 others that were in the northern part of the Ankgor Wat complex including Preah Kahn which is one of the few sites that has been left in ruins as it was found - trees growing out of walls, etc.
Our last day in Siem Reap, Tuesday, we rented a tuk tuk to take us to a few remaining sites that we wanted to see, one of them being Ta Prohm which was where Angelina Jolie filmed Tomb Raider a few years - they love her in Cambodia! ;-) It's another site that has been mainly left as it was found - huge silk/cotton trees growing out of the walls, large fallen stones everywhere, etc. The amount of Japanese tourists though...argh!
We were completely exhausted and drenched at the end of every day there - beautiful sunny days, but in the 80's and HUMID! My clothes were pretty much falling off me. We ran into the New Zealand couple we had met on the bus ride from Saigon and had dinner with them one night - very cool people. We had foot massages one night too - $5 for one hour, each! Crazy, isn't it? Besides behing exhausted from visiting all the temples, we also got exhausted from being hawked by tuk tuk drivers, etc. The town wouldn't be what it is without Ankgor Wat and isn't 100% representative of the rest of Cambodia. There were some incredibly nice people, but also many who just feed off the tourists, try to scam you as much as they can and are just constantly after you.
One of my highlights though was one of the kids trying to sell us stuff at one of the smaller sites - a little girl about 9 or 10 years old. Her english was great, she liked that my name was Kim because it's a Cambodian name (actually an extremely common asian name - I should have started taking photos of all the signs with my name on them!) and she drew us a beautiful picture of flowers. She wasn't as in your face as some of the other kids, just very friendly, adorable, and smart.
Tuesday evening we flew back to Hanoi and tonight we head to Sapa where we have a guide meeting us who will take us hiking to a few mountain villages to meet some locals and see how they live, what their customs are, etc. We are going to be staying in a local's house overnight too which should be great. We take the overnight train back to Hanoi Friday night and on our last day, Saturday, we'll do some shopping. We've only bought a few things so far because we didn't want to have to carry them everywhere, so we'll make up for that on Saturday!
See some of you soon and others of you soon thereafter. Love from both of us!
