Today I made my way to Angkor after breakfast to check out
some more of the ruins but before I give you the play by play of what I did
today I should probably tell you a little bit about Angkor since I’m fairly
certain I didn’t write anything informative last time I visited.
Angkor served as the seat of the Khmer Empire from roughly
802 to 1431. It was the site of over 1000 temples. Today these temples seem to
be a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist temples although I’m pretty sure back in the
day they were mainly Hindu but I have read some conflicting information on this
so I’m not positive. Angkor Wat is the temple drawing the most visitors and is
famous for being the largest single religious monument. Angkor Wat is also
featured on the Cambodian flag. Angkor is also considered to be the largest preindustrial
city in the world. As you can imagine since these buildings are in pretty rough
shape since they are so old, some have been completely reduced to piles of
rubble.
Now with the educational bit out of the way I can start to
tell you about my day. Freya and I hopped in tuk-tuk after breakfast and made
our way to the ancient city. Our first stop was the famous Angkor Wat. I had
visited this temple with the boys a few days ago so I wasn’t overly excited
about it but I quickly realized we had only seen a small portion of the temple
and I still had a lot left to see. As we were queuing to climb to the top we
met Alfie from England and Pedro from Spain and wandered through the rest of
the temple with them. It really is a pretty magnificent building. All of the
detail put into the wall carvings alone must have taken years. The height of
the building is also quite impressive since they wouldn’t have had any
machinery to help them out with the heavy lifting. Instead the Khmer people
just piled dirt up alone the side of the building making a hill or a ramp for
them to climb up with building materials. I’m not sure how long it took to
build Angkor Wat but I’m guessing much like Rome it wasn’t built in a day.
From there I think our next stop was Angkor Thom but I’m not
positive. I found it quite hard to keep track of all the places we visited,
their names aren’t easy to remember and after a while they all start to look
the same even though they are all quite different. We also visited the temple
from Tomb Raider, which seemed to be almost as popular as Angkor Wat. I have
never seen the movie so I’m not really sure what the fuss was all about but the
ruins have trees growing on and around them, causing destruction of the temples
but also creating beauty at the same time.
We spent a little over four hours visiting the various ruins
before heading back to the hostel. There were still hundreds of temples left
for us to explore but we had seen all the main ones and all the famous ones and
it was about a million degrees outside, okay maybe it was only 35 but it was
also quite humid and temple visits involve a ridiculous amount of stair
climbing and neither of us had the energy to see any more.
We lounged around the hostel for a bit before meeting up
with Rachel (you might remember her from my adventures in Phnom Penh) and
headed to Pub Street for dinner. Alfie and Pedro were supposed to join us but
it was already dark and we still hadn’t heard from them so we ventured off on
our own. It took us a while to decide on a place but eventually we ended up at
Red Piano, luckily they have free Wi-Fi so I was able to message Alfie and tell
him where we were and he joined us as we were finishing our meals. We waited
for him to eat and everyone enjoyed a few beers while I sipped on my coke.
Once we had all eaten it was time to move on. We talked
about going across the street to check out some live music but Freya was
worried she would fall asleep if there was any more sitting involved so we made
our way to Angkor What and spent the rest of the night bouncing between there
and Temple Club. It was a much different vibe than the previous two times I’ve
gone out here, mainly because I was in a group of people who were just looking
to have a few drinks and do some dancing rather than going out on a mission to
get laid. I had a much better time with the girls and Alfie and came home
rather happy, just annoyed with drunk people.
The plan for tomorrow is to go visit some waterfall
somewhere not too far away with Alfie and Freya and maybe a few more temples as
well so I should probably try to get some sleep.
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