Legends of the Hidden Temple - Siem Reap, Cambodia!

Welcome to Legends of the Hidden Temple / Indiana Jones!  This post is going to be pictures because most of my time in Siem Reap was spent temple hopping, so I'll keep the text brief.  Essentially, I spent 3 days here in between Vietnam and Thailand.  The temple complexes were absolutely unreal.  When I heard that you could bike to the temples, I immediately thought that's what I was going to do, but a good friend, McKenzie, had warned me that I may want to get a tuk-tuk driver to take me around instead of biking - boy was she right - I don't think I've wanted shade as badly as I did in Siem Reap!

Before I start, a few words on the Cambodian people.   They are incredibly friendly and their english is great.  Most of them have such a strong understanding of the language that they can crack jokes with you.  This warmth and their inclination to always be of service is even more amazing considering they had a genocide in the late 70's where almost 2M people were killed.  I wish I had more time in Cambodia, but I appreciated every minute I had while I was there.

Temples Day 1:  Johanna, an awesome German girl that I had met in northern Vietnam and had been hanging out with for two weeks as we worked our way down south in Vietnam, happened to overlap in Siem Reap with me for a day.  I also met a guy named Waqas in my hostel who happened to live in the financial district in Manhattan, so I coordinated between the three of us and arranged for a tuk-tuk driver to drive us around for a big day of temples starting at 7am to try to beat the heat and crowds.  Here are some of the highlights:

Angkor Thom: Actually the largest temple complex, made up of multiple smaller temples.

Bayon - this temple has over 200 faces inscribed on the stone

Me with one of the Bayon faces

Baphoun

Baphoun

At the top of Baphoun!

First sighting of multiple monks - so cool!

Phimeanakas

Thommanon

I love this one - a Buddhist man sleeping in front of his little Buddha with toss sticks burning in the background.

Ta Prohm - Where a lot of the Indiana Jones movie, Tomb Raider, was filmed - this one was super cool!  The trees were incredibly immense and were overgrowing everything.

Group shot :)

Johanna told me to take a jumping shot - hahaha!

Wow!!!

Angkor Wat - Part 1 - We were so tired from being out in the heat all day that we did this one rather quickly, more photos on day two...

End of Day 1: Group selfie with our tuk-tuk driver, Moeunran!

Day 2:  Waqas, myself and two other guys we met (Alex from San Francisco and Peter from London) decided to do the sunrise at Angkor Wat.  We left our hotel in our tuk tuk at 5am, saw the sunrise and then went to see some of the farther out temples until mid morning.  Important note about my wardrobe - I have fully embraced the traveling lifestyle and have purchased three of the amazing "elephant" pants that are incredibly comfortable, perfect for hot weather and have obnoxiously bright prints - perfect for me.  I decided to wear them today because some of the temples required more modest dress to enter, so I had to cover my knees.  After about two hours, there were sticking to me so much that they ripped a huge hole in the crotch!  It started out rather small, but by the end of the day, I had a nice large hole in the butt of my pants...haha.  Besides that, here are some scenes from the day:

Angkor Wat

Makes the 4:30am worth it - sunrise from Angkor Wat

Love how you can see the shadows from the sun still rising...

Same thing here...

The most decorative Buddhist shrine in Angkor Wat

Preah Kahn

One of my favorites because of the peach color of some of the stones that was a great contrast to the moss growing everywhere. 

View from the outside

 This is around 7am so the sun is still coming up.

Love the colors

Alex found a spot for us to shimmy up and climb to the top - super cool - me from the top of Preah Khan!

Ta Som

A few of the stacked rocks on the windowsill and outside - these rock stacks were all over the place - we're pretty sure its because its a Buddhist meditative activity

Bats!  We saw these in all of the cavernous ceilings in this one...

Pre Rup

Mr. Elephant!  There were elephants on all of the corners as if they were guarding the grounds.

Day 3:  This day was mostly about relaxing and getting organized for moving again.  One thing I learned while reading a book...if you sit still for too long, the little geckos will think you're a wall or a piece of furniture that they can crawl on...this was quiet frightening  I also had an amazing run-in with an AWST teammate - Sabrina!  She was a diver on our team in college and graduated 2 years before me.  I happened to see on facebook that she was in Siem Reap at the same time as me, so we met up for lunch.  Such a small world!

So great to see a familiar face!  

So long for now, Cambodia, it's off to Thailand!