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| Our first temple! |
It was another early start for us the next
morning on the bus to Siem Reap. By this point, it is safe to say that we were
both of the mind set that if we never saw another bus again it would be too
soon… Fortunately the journey, albeit lengthy, wasn’t too bad – the bus was
much newer than any we’d been on before, good air con (a little too good at
times), free snacks, free wifi (although it only worked for the first 20
minutes) and movies in English…all for the same price as the sweat box we’d had
the day before!
We arrived in Siem Reap at about 6pm and
fortunately our hotel had arranged for a tuk tuk pick up from the bus station
as it was a fair trek from town. Having eaten nothing but bus food all day
(pringles and oreos) we were ravenous so took a stroll to a local BBQ
restaurant with cheap beer and then came back to our hotel to take advantage of
the free rooftop fish spa before calling it a night!
The temples of Angkor were pretty high on
our ‘must-do’ list for SE Asia and having done a fair bit of research before
we arrived in Siem Reap we’d already decided to spend three days exploring the
temples in order to make the most of it. We’d bargained for a tuk tuk driver
for the day the night before and our hotel owner told us out itinerary would
cost us about $12, which was fine by us.
We treated ourselves to a bit of a lie-in
and took to the road at about 9am to visit some of the smaller temples further
from the centre of Angkor – our plan was to see the smaller ones first and
build up to the biggest ones on our last day so as not to get ‘templed-out’ too
quickly. Our guide took us to the Roluos Group of temples about 20km away.
First stop was the ticket office – you have
to pay and then get your picture taken for the ticket, then keep it safe for
the whole three days (no rips, water damage, folding etc) or they make you pay
again. |
| Running the gauntlet |
It was already burning hot by the time we
arrived at the first temple and because of the time of day it was already
packed with tour groups meaning you couldn’t really get near to any of the
interesting bits and even if you did you were soon pushed out of the way by
some bolshie frenchies! It wasn’t bad for our first temple experience though
and it was impressive nonetheless. Unfortunately for us the other two temples
in the group involved A LOT more stairs and by the time we’d finished exploring
all three we were both a sweaty exhausted mess!
We had more temples on our itinerary though
which we only really knew the names of (rather than the location) so we tried
our best to explain them to our driver, to which he responded we’d need to pay
him $20 rather than $12. We tried bargaining but he wasn’t having any of it,
and we were both a bit miffed having discussed it with the hotel owner the
night before. We had no choice though as we wanted to see the temples and tuk
tuk was the only way to do it so we agreed and set off again.
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| Temple puppies! |
Soon it became abundantly clear why the
price had suddenly gone up so much – it’s hard to get an idea of the scale of
the Angkor temples until you’ve driven between them all in a tuk tuk! And what
we’d thought were a couple more temples fairly close together were actually
fairly far apart, with many smaller temples in between that our driver –
obviously wanting to give us ultimate value for money – insisted we should look
at! By 4pm we’d seen eight temples and had to run the gauntlet of countless children peddling their wares, so we were mere sweaty shadows of our former
selves! Our driver asked us if we wanted to go and see Angkor Wat for sunset
but knowing we had another two days left to explore and craving our bed more
than anything else on earth we declined the offer.
We were soon glad that we had declined as
on the way back whilst we were driving past Angkor Wat it started to rain
lightly, then heavily – then it was torrential. For some reason the driver
didn’t want to stop until we were almost floating down the street so James and
I had to battle in the back trying to zip the waterproof covers down as we
rattled along the bumpy roads and on more than one occasion James came very close to toppling over the edge of the tuk tuk!
By the time we got back and dried off we
couldn’t even muster the energy to venture out for dinner, so it was fortunate
our hotel also had a rooftop restaurant and cocktail bar that we took very
brief advantage of before passing out at about 8.30pm!
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| Preah Khan |
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