Around Angkor

Dear all

The second day of our three day trip to Siem Reap involved tipping a protesting Dean out of bed at the ungodly hour of 4.00am so we could go and watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. With having already been there on the previous day Dean took an awful amount of persuading, but we roused our driver 'Rocket' Ronnie and duly set off on our pilgrimage. It was stunning, more so because the dawn twilight masked some of the bright green monoflex covering the scaffolding over part of the front renovations. Once we had digested this romantic view with the couple of other thousand tourists (!) we set off on our real tour of the day taking the tuk tuk some 50 km north to a place called Kbal Spean, which is  a riverbed that contains thousands of carvings, set deep into the forest.

 

You walk about 2km uphill from the carpark and then you walk back down the riverbank following the carvings. Why anyone would do this I have no idea, but it was a cool aside to dusty 'ruined' temples that make up the rest of the area.  

Our next stop was the Beautiful temple of Banteay Srei. The stone is all shades of pink and red and the detail in the carvings was amazing and well worth the visit. We then tracked our way back towards Angkor Thom for the final leg of our temple tour (or over tour if you ask Dean LOL) and took in the country sights.  

As you pass the homes of people in rural areas you quite often see spirit houses in use despite the prevailing religion being Buddhism. However around this area the folk also make use of scarecrows to ward of ghosts and other evil spirits & we often saw these 'dummies' literally strapped to the front gate. Some of them were even 'armed' with cardboard knives or bazookas!  Our final clutch of temples were on the northern reaches of the main Angkor sites being Eastern Mebon, Ta Sam & Preah Khan & by then even I was starting to glaze over and Dean was well past his tolerance zone. So with a final whizz through the city of Angkor Thom we bid our farewell to the temples of SE Asia (postscript: or so we thought!!)

Thanks for looking

Hugs

Sara