Siem Reap and Angkor Whaat?

We left Bangkok with the group and headed for the Cambodian boarder, which took about 4 hours. We'd heard that it can be a bit of a nightmare getting across without paying 'extras' to officials, but we had no problems getting through. After the formalities at the border we headed to Siem Reap.

In the evening we all went to a local Khmer village by tuk tuk for dinner- a five course meal cooked by a local family. Before we ate we had a tour around the village, which was very rural and so different to city life. The food was great (the best Amok we've had) and the people were friendly.

The following day we got up at 4.30am (!!) to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat (Wat = temple).
After a sleepy start, we headed to Angkor Wat in the dark and grabbed a coffee, served by a little boy called Spider Boy. In Cambodia, children only go to school for half a day, so a lot of them work the other half to earn money for the family.

Despite the mass crowds who were also there to catch the spectacle, the sunrise was awesome and just about worth getting up so early for! Once Marc had taken over 75 photos of the sunrise, we headed back to the hotel for breakfast (and a nap) and then went back to Angkor Wat to look around 3 different temples.

The first temple was called Ta Prohm (or Jungle temple), made famous by the Tomb Raider movie. It was built in the 12th and early 13th Century, so was pretty cool to look at and climb around. At one point we stopped for a group photo , only to be photo-bombed by a load of asian tourists who then proceeded to take loads of photos of us! They love westerners apparently.

We then headed to the main temple, Angkor Wat, for a look around it in the daylight.  It's the largest Hindu temple in the world, built in the early 12th century, so pretty old! We headed to one final temple, but by then we were all templed-out.

One of the streets in Siem Reap was called Pub Street, which sounded like our sort of place. There were quite a few bars to choose from, so we decided to sample a handful of them along with 4 girls from the tour group. One of the bars was called Angkor What? Genius.

We got back to the hotel at around 4.30am, and had  to check out at 11.15am the next day to get a 6 hour bus to Phnom Penh with a stinkin' hangover. Ugh.