Ankor wat at sunrise and another punctured ...
Trip Start
Jul 09, 2001
1
39
66
Trip End
Ongoing
Seam Reap, Cambodia
Tuesday, October 16, 2001
We woke up at 4:30am........ can you believe it?!?!?! 4:30! Wow. It was dark and took us only 15 minutes to get out of bed sort our stuff out and then jump on the back of a motobike and head off towards the Ankor Wat Temples to see the sunrise. Only 5 minutes down the road lukes bike suddenly fell behind a bit and when we turned around to find out what as wrong we found his driver had got a punctured tire and gone somewhere to fix it. Thats the 3rd time in a row that our ride has broken down in as many days!! When the driver didnt come back after 10 minutes luke jumped onto my bike and we eventually got to Ankor Wat while the sun was still down. I thought we'd been quite cunning in deciding to do the temples so early. "There wont be any people there!" we thought. Not so. It seems everyone had the same idea and there was at least 30 people hanging around just inside the first bit to watch the sunrise over the main Temple (the one with the wierd pinecones sticking out the top) We stayed there for a bit and then got pissed off with the amount of people and moved into the main temple and wandered around in semi-darkness. It was quite spooky. We watched the sunrise from the eastern most point of the temple and then started treking around the temples, getting lost in forests looking for other temples and trying to find our moto bike dude to take us to the next temple. By the time it got to 8:30am I could have sworn it was midday. The sun was beating down and making us sweat like a pair of twats and we only had a strange local hotdog thing for breakfast so we didnt have much energy. Even so we made it until about 1pm before quitting and by that time we'd seen most of the temples, or the half decent ones at least. The first one was by far the most impressive, mainly I found because of the shear size, and also because the engravings on the walls and the general layout of the place was quite well intact. We saw a few half deralic ones which wern't really that interesting. A few kids started following us around them and telling us the storys that go with them. At first I thought they were either being helpful or using us to practice their english or somethnig - then I remembered we were in Cambodia and striaght after they'd finished came the "Now you can help me yes" Meaning "Give me some money for following you around and talking even though you didnt ask me to" I had a different guy to luke who spoke pretty good english so I decided to give him a small tip for the 10minutes he'd spent, I got out 500real out of the 2000 I had left and offered it to him (thats probably about 20p in english) and he had the cheek to refuse, say it's too small and said I could pay him in dollars. Cheeky bastard! In the end I just walked away and he got nothing.
We saw the Temple with all the trees growing around it, ontop of it and inside it which was another highlight and a few others and then started to get bored. It's the same as always, you can see these sorts of things for a while but then once you've seen so many, it gets boring. We only got a 1 day pass and some people were there on 3 day passes, I can't imagine how they do it unless they're seriously interested in it, 1 day for us was enough and it was pretty long day at that! When we got back to the hotel we got a bite too eat at the upstairs resteraunt. HAPPY CHicken Soup!! I was casually scanning the menu, as you do, being undesisive when all of a sudden I see :- Happy Chicken Soup (Chicken soup with rice and a pinch of ganja) $1.80. 2 of these for sure we said! We ended up eatting our happy chicken soup and smoking spliffs on the nice terrace, having a quick nap and then doing the same again in the evening but without the chicken soup. The chicken soup, due to the setting and ingredients, is probably the second best chicken soup I've had. First place obviously goes to mothers home cooked chicken soup but this was a nice, happy, second.... (good contestant for first though - mother take note!)
Theres not really a lot to do in Seam Reap unless your seeing the temples. We were going to try and get up into Laos but you have to go all the way back down to Phnom Phen to get the Visa and we're not paying another $22 for the boat to come back up so I think we're gonna hit the Cambodian coast! Do some beach chilling for a while and then try and Island hop our way into thailand (if anyones got any good suggestions on how to do this let me know!). Maybe we'll still get up to Laos at some point, we're gonna see Chaing Mia which is north Thailand and pretty close to laos so who knows?!?
