After the Gibbon Experience I really didn’t have a lot of time left in Southeast Asia before I was due to meet cousin Helen in India.  With that in mind I hopped on a quick puddle-jumper flight out of Luang Prabang and landed in Siem Reap, Cambodia just an hour later.  I decided to take out Vietnam from my itinerary – it was just too much to do in just six weeks and now that I’ve been on the road for a while I’ve really been able to appreciate the notion of “quality verses quantity,” so that means it was straight to Cambodia.

Landing in Cambodia after the quite and laid-back times in Laos was a bit of culture shock in and of itself.  The children in Siem Reap do some very aggressive begging and selling – I actually had a hard time handling the pace of Cambodia for the first day and camped out in the guesthouse so that my mind had time to adjust to cars and motorbikes whizzing by and the incessant call of beggars at every turn of the road.  Several children even clasp your hand and walk beside you for several minutes in attempts to beg for food – the first few times I felt bad about not buying them food and offered up and orange I had in my purse – but there’s just huge quantities of these types of children…and well…it was a quandary…what am I supposed to do in that situation?  Once you give one any food you have on you they all swarm you and plead – it was all just a bit hard to handle.

Now, I don’t want to give the wrong impression – Cambodia is really great and my opinion now that I’ve left is largely positive…but it is definitely a totally separate country from Laos with its own distinct personality and charm.  Siem Reap, though, didn’t take long to win my heart just a little – the first evening in town I had some of the best Western food I’ve found in months.

Our guesthouse was within walking distance of the night-market and the touristy areas of the city…and really, I didn’t mind that after some of the remote towns and experiences in Laos.  I spent the whole first evening camped out at an exquisite gourmet vegetarian restaurant with Laura (total price of dinner, drink, appetizer, and desert: $7). And this restaurant had my favorite unique drink to-date: Tamarind Ice Tea – it was totally bizarre and the first sip was face-scrunchingly tart, but after that it was wholly refreshing and just what I needed after a blisteringly hot day…not that I’m complaining about the heat after all of the whining I did about the cold weather in Laos… my Florida-girl self is loving every second of it!

So, couple the really amazing food with some rampant free WiFi at nearly every restaurant and I was pretty much in heaven – I managed to crank out some mad work while I was in Cambodia….which is good because, well, I can’t say that I am doing too well with this whole budgeting concept…even though everything in SEA is amazingly cheap I have definitely blown through some dough – Gibbon was pricey and the flight to Cambodia also just a bit dear.

But why did I spend the extra dough to come to Cambodia you might wonder – well it was pretty much wholly to visit Angkor Wat (and the orphanage).  Laura and I woke up early the next day after an evening of indulging in delicious foods, slathered ourselves in copious amounts of sunscreen (I was also rocking a floppy hat, sunglasses, and a face mask to combat the dust and traffic pollution- I was the height of attractive let me assure you!) and rented bicycles to take us out to the main temple of Angkor Wat.

We opted for the three-day pass to the temples and were pretty excited to round a bend in the road and come upon the huge moat and large iconic structures of Angkor Wat.  After securing out bikes (and being hounded by eight or so children selling bracelets and books) we flashed our passes and joined the heaps of other tourists with mouths gapping and cameras working frantically in attempts to capture even a small iota of the beauty of Angkor.

I actually knew very little about Angkor Wat before I got there but the temple was built by King Suryavarman II in the 12^th Century as a holy city by for his people.   I was really surprised to discover that Angkor Wat itself is just one of a dozen of pagodas in the area – they are spread out over acres and acres and you get to explore them all with your Angkor pass – and here I thought there was just the iconic temple!

Angkor Wat is a labyrinth of intricately carved walls, over-hangings, statues, and just about everything in sight – right away when we stepped into the Wat Laura and I noted that there was some pretty strange energy in this place.  I’m not going all hippy on you guys, but you know when you walk into a place and you just get a weird vibe…well that’s what it was like here…and it wasn’t wholly positive.  Well, wouldn’t you know that our initial inauspicious comment about the energy would lead to a thoroughly frustrating search for each other for the next four hours.  How you can lose someone for four hours in just one single location I do not know, but we were both dehydrated and exhausted by the time we found one-another by the food-stalls (this sort of situation is more easily solved in the US when you’re sporting a cell phone glued to your side every minute of the day).

Anyhow, I did manage to get some great shots of Angkor Wat throughout my hunt to find her (she actually had several people on the look-out for a tall girl with an ugly brown floppy hat…me apparently!).  Some of my favorite features of Angkor are the dancing ladies carved into the walls.  And as a true backpacker, rather than pay for my own tour guide I wandered close to some of the other guides as they were giving tours…not exactly the classy option, but hey, it was cheap.  The long wall of images are Bas Relief carvings that circle the perimeter of the temple and tell the story of various battles in addition to one wall dedicated to the story of the Ramayana (which I knew about from a brief obsession with the movie The Little Princess all those years ago).

On my search for Laura I sat down at one point for about an hour (I figured if I stopped moving she might walk by) and had a really great talk with some Cambodian monks.  Their English was pretty basic but once we got past the standard pleasantries of my age, marital status and number of siblings (everyone asks you these three questions), I was able to probe them about their education and what they do all day – it was really great and strange because they laughed a lot whenever I said something…was it lack of comprehension or were they laughing at me?  I’m not sure but I’m going with the former.

Once Laura and I hooked back up again, the over-friendly Cambodian children swarming our bikes and hawking their wares (they actually played an integral part in reuniting Laura and myself and as such talked us into buying several bracelets we didn’t need) pointed out a spot just down the road with some premium views of the sunset.  We hiked for about 15 minutes into the hills, dodged slow-moving tourists who were clogging the hiking paths and arrived at the spot.  The huge structure had signs all over it indicating we shouldn’t climb onto the walls but yet the guards nearby seemed not to mind.  So, like a lemming we gladly joined the hundred or so other tourists perched on the ledges for some sublime views of the sunset – we passed the time with a series of sun-photos of the orangey-red setting sun.

Next week I’ll give the next Angkor installment with some more pictures and videos  of the outlying pagodas of Angkor Wat – plus pictures of the stunningly beautiful overgrown temple where they filmed scenes for Tomb Raider.

Oh! I’m in India now so look out for that post in the next couple of days!