Angkor, Angkor, Angkor Wat!

Now, let me admit here and now that I have been excited about seeing Angkor Wat from the day we decided to visit Cambodia. Now let me also admit that I got Angkor Wat completely mixed us with Borobudur in Indonesia and only realised my mistake when I was actually standing in front of said Wat. Not any of the pictures, photos, conversations about the internationally recognised symbol of Cambodia had actually penetrated my haze of blissful ignorance. Cough.

Now, onto the magnificence of Angkor Wat! As is my wont I can’t help a snippet of history geekdom slipping through, please bear with me whist I give a very brief overview of why on earth there are a whole selection of odd buildings nestling in the Cambodian jungle. Bearing in mind my mistake above a few hard solid facts would not go amiss. Basically the Khmers (pretty powerful in their time, ruling much of their neighbouring countries) starting building wats/temples and the outlying towns in AD802. As each King came along he built a new citadel, hopefully bigger and flashier than the previous one. Another action of these obviously retiring kings was to declare themselves as god-kings, the representation of the Hindu god Shiva on earth. They then built there temples as temple-mountains, supposed to symbolise the holy mountain at the centre of the universe. And they slept there. Puh. Anyway the upshot of this is a multitude (100s) of temples, made feng shui before they even knew what it meant, that reflected the (huge) personality and ego of each successive king. Let’s have a glance through some of these monuments to themselves shall we? Ego aside though you have to give them props, at its height Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples had a population of 1 million whilst London struggled to hit 50,000.

Now, as I’ve mentioned there are a  fair few temples out there so a little judicious planning and a large dollop of able assistance from our tuk tuk driver was necessary. We met him when we stumbled off the bus from Phnom Penh and he became our designated drive for the next 4 days. And what a gentleman he was.

For less than $20 a day he was at our often tired/hot/hungry/thirsty beck and call and guided us to the best temples whilst always making it seem like it was our idea. Genius. He even kept a smile on his face when we stumbled out of our hotel at 5 in the morning and remained unconscious in the back for the next hour whilst we raced to catch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. It was cloudy. No sunrise. Awesome.

We were pretty lucky (smart) as we established the route that all of the tours take, and they all take the same ones at the same time, and decided to do the exact opposite route each day. Cue our code language to our tuk tuk driver and speedy exits whenever we so much as caught a sniff of a coach on the horizon. The happy result of this is that we often had entire temples to ourselves which made imagining yourselves being there 1000 years ago that much easier. Us being us, following our early wakeup call (more on that later) we may have taken advantage of this solitude by having a nap or two propped up against a wall listening to the birds sing and the leaves rustle. Bliss. Don’t know what Lara Croft was thinking leaping about making a racket with her shiny guns. Missed a trick there.

There were, however, occasions where interaction with our fellow humans was necessary. Unavoidable, actually, at Angkor Wat, the behemoth cherry on the cake of all the temples. Well, it would have been if you could have zapped away the thousands of fellow tourists and bright green scaffolding. Yes, Scaffolding. Sigh.

Walking the gauntlet of the many hawkers selling anything g and everything wasn’t a joy filled activity either but Alex was kept entertained by the young kids selling bangles inexplicably decided to call me Michelle Obama henceforth. Loudly. I repeat, sigh. All Cambodian children were happily removed from my black books (more of a tome really) when we espied them playing and clambering in quiet corners of the further flung temples. Can you imagine the whole Angkor Wat area as your personal playing ground? Incredible.

Now before you think that I (and it would obviously be me) had coerced Master Southern into living a life of all work and no play I can happily report that Siem Reap easily lent itself to some food & drink fuelled play in the evening. Lots of bars and restaurants packed into one small street and filled withal manner of people. From young travellers sampling (copiously) the $0.50 pints of beer and banana/nutella pancakes to the families and the older crowd staying in posh resorts and eating up a storm in one of the many great restaurants and buying up trinkets. We fell somewhere in the middle. We drank till we got drunk for about $5 but believe you me we also ate up a BBQ flavoured storm. Post dinner spa treatments came courtesy of Dr Fish.

For all of the above reasons it was pretty hard to leave Siem Reap but we were always aware that this was Disney’s version of Cambodia so leave we did by catching a boat to Battambang.