Further Wanderings

The Angkor ruins are a HUGE series of buildings (mostly Hindu/Buddhist temples)constructed between the 9th and 15th centuries AD.  They were built by the Khmers when they were at the height of their power and their empire encompassed most of southeast Asia.  To give some idea of the scale involved, the whole city/complex of Angkor covered around 1000 square kilometres at its peak (yes, 10^3.  I didn’t just add a 0 by mistake) and included individual temples whose dimensions could be measured in kilometres, as well as huge resevoirs up to 2 x 9km in size.I’d been to the Angkor temples in 2004 with my parents, but Sarah hadn’t visited them before.  And if one is in mainland southeast Asia, there is no other more “must visit” a place, no more “must see” an attraction than Angkor.

In the name of simplicity, I won’t bother going into great detail about every temple we visited and every carving we saw.  I’ll just give a brief summary of how our visit to Angkor went, and then just let the photos do the talking.

Carvings on one of the Elephant Terraces in Angkor Thom

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Following our surprisingly simple journey into the country, and a very pleasant night in Battambang, we woke up nice and early to catch a bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.

When I’d visited Cambodia about 3.5 years before the roads in Cambodia ranged in quality from mediocre down to utterly abysmal. Further, it seemed that almost every vehicle in the country was designed so that only passengers under 5′2″ (i.e. many Cambodians) could ride comfortably. Combined with the fact that vehicles were routinely packed far beyond capacity (I recall a ride in a small VW van type thing with 22 people inside) I expected that our bus trip would be far from pleasant.

Fortunately things had changed. The road from Battambang to PP was paved and in pretty good shape. The bus had air conditioning and (just) adequate legroom. And while we did have to stop to repair a flat tire, it was a pleasant enough stop featuring a chat with some Cambodian-Americans back home visiting and a snack of fried spiders on a stick.

Mmm… Big hairy spider in my mouth.  These guys were a lot smaller than the last spider I ate in Cambodia, but you got 5 of them skewered on a stick.  They actually taste pretty good, though I still wasn’t too keen on chewing up the squishy abdomen

This one I wouldn’t be quite so keen on eating (though at least it proved that they were fresh) 

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A quick entry just to get us up to date: We left Chittagong at 14:35, with the only hitch being a minor disagreement with our autorickshaw driver about exactly where he'd agreed to take us and for how much. [Continue reading this entry]

After my evening in the town of Kratie, I was well rested and ready to hit the road again. Or rather, the water, as I my route headed still further up the Mekong river to the town of Stung ... [Continue reading this entry]

After arriving back in Phnom Penh, I took a quick look at the television before heading out for dinner and was astonished by what I saw. I'd been up in the hills near Kampot for the past few days ... [Continue reading this entry]

The trip to Kampot was interesting from the start. Leaving my guesthouse at 10:00 meant that I would need to take a mini-bus instead of an actual bus-bus. The moto (motorcycle taxi) to the minibus station was an ... [Continue reading this entry]

I feel like I really ought to be able to describe the countryside we passed through on the bus trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, but sadly about all I can say is that ... [Continue reading this entry]

We arrived at Siem Reap International airport relaxed and well fed. I'd spent much of the flight talking with the Englishwoman beside me about other parts of southeast Asia and was more than ready to make my way into ... [Continue reading this entry]