Angkor Temples – Day 1
So we arranged with a tuk-tuk driver the night before for a 6 am pick-up at our guesthouse. Well, our tuk-tuk driver came; along with his father. Who was also a tuk-tuk driver. So, you guessed it, the father became our tuk-tuk driver. Which was fine…he spoke enough English to get us where we needed to go and he could probably open a tin-can with his teeth. He had the most amazing pointed metal rods as teeth. They looked painful.
So anyway, we were off to the place where we got our passes – it took about 10 minutes and $60/pp later we had passes for 1 week. Which apparently was unusual since the lady that was selling them automatically asked “1 day”or “3 day” – and we replied “7 day”, which they gladly sold us.
After we picked up Natalie we headed SE of Siem Reap to the Roluos Group – which were some of the oldest of what is included in the Angkor pass. What I didn’t get before we came here (mostly because I didn’t want to be disappointed – so I limited my research!) was that there are quite a number of these temples scattered around the area and it’s kind of up to you how extensively you want to view them. We went for the 1 week pass so we had the potential to see them all. And we didn’t want to get “Wat-ted out” which both Roniq and Natalie said they had suffered from. Meaning everything starts looking the same and you’re like “Wat-ever”. Boy, I have to leave this internet cafe soon…
We visited Lolei, Preah Ko and Bakong that first day – Bakong being the biggest and most impressive. But I thought the coolest thing was the guy that was doing miniatures of some of the temples. He had done Angkor Wat and a couple of other ones and it was like getting a cheap-bastard helicopter view of the temples. And he was a nice man and it was his birthday so, really…
Next…floating village/flooded forest. We went by tuk-tuk to a certain point and then by motorbike the rest of the way to where we got on a “big boat” to the floating village. It’s this kind of strange village that is on stilts kind of in the marshlands of this gigantic lake. But to me it’s like, why would you build a village in the middle of a lake? But it was very cool. We went from the “big boat” to a dug-out canoe and were paddled around by a woman that was 8-months pregnant and her daughter who was around 10ish (mostly by the mother – the daughter kind of helped) and went through the floating forest. It’s essentially what you would expect to see – a bunch of cool looking trees half under water that you can canoe through. The mom took some leaves off of a tree and proceeded to eat one and then handed us some — um, yeah, they tasted like leaves. But apparently edible leaves since I’m writing this blog today…
It kind of looked like we were in a semi-untouristed area until we were heading back to see all the tourists coming in. I guess we timed our whole trip pretty well. We had the first 2 temples we went to practically to ourselves and the village/forest to ourselves…this, we decided was the key to viewing the temples…avoiding the large tour groups with their matching hats…
That night we went to the butterfly garden for dinner (yummmm) although we didn’t see any butterflies because, well, it was night, and said goodbye to Natalie who was on her way to Laos the next day. It was definitely a good start to our viewing of the Angkor temples.
Tags: angkor, Cambodia, RTW Trip
JohnCin
Leave a Reply