Amazing Angkor Wat

To Siem Reap, Cambodia

The guidebooks recommend at least three days to explore the temples of “Angkor Wat.” That's because the actual Angkor Wat temple site is just one of many scattered over the flat, tropical landscape. And, despite the vast size of Angkor Wat -- nearly one kilometer on a side -- nearby Angkor Thom is easily five or six times as big. Just the moats around each of these rectangular cities are between 200 and 300 ft wide!

So as to ensure our temple viewing stamina held up, we decided to spread out the one day itinerary of the most popular temples over two days. For today, we would see Angkor Wat itself and then the “Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones” temple of Ta Prohm. The latter is famous for the huge tree roots growing over the crumbling temple walls.

Angkor Wat was definitely impressive, though it was hard for it to live up to the "spine tingling" description in the Lonely Planet. We apparently are here smack dab in the middle of peak tourist season, so taking a picture without a ton of people in it, was a bit of a struggle.

The kids did quite well, though there was some grumbling before lunch as we walked around the inner walls to view the base reliefs. In contrast, we all very much enjoyed the primitive, jungle feel of Ta Prohm. The high humidity added to the effect where the trees were really the stars of the show.

At 3 p.m., we congratulated ourselves on a good day’s sightseeing, found our tuk-tuk driver, and headed back to the manor. With a list of errands to do, Meg and I went into town leaving Dex and Kylie to do some homework. In nothing flat, we'd found a travel agent and knocked out the most important item, a bus ticket to Bangkok for the day after next. This let us concentrate on buying some small miscellaneous items. It's amazing how happy we were to get just a few new things -- for Dex and Kylie, a couple new spiral notepads; two mechanical pencils; a ruler, triangle, and protractor set; and a small pencil sharpener. Meg and I splurged on a new folder for miscellaneous documents, ibuprophen, shampoo, and new toothbrushes! Sometimes it's the small things....

Kylie modeling one of her two new dresses.

Dress number two, with a new hairdo, courtesy Len

Dale, the English owner of the guesthouse, along with his wife, Len, who recently bought the business had told told us of an authentic Italian restaurant just down the road. We promised ourselves yesterday to visit and I suggested watching the Martian afterwards as an extra special treat. Actually, this would fit in nicely with the space and solar system facts Kylie had been reading about, so really this was primarily an educational endeavor! Though it turned out we bit off more than we could chew with the movie -- a bit too long for temple weary kids -- the dinner with homemade bread sticks and outstanding pasta did not disappoint.