5th November - Siem Reap, 13°N 104°E

The bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap takes 6 hours. After 2 non-stop hours on the road we were only 50 miles from PP and still weaving around potholes on the unsealed road. I’m not an expert on road building but even I know that you don’t put big stones in the top layer of hardcore. The road is being resurfaced but, instead of resurfacing it in short sections, they have removed the tarmac completely from a 30km section leaving the subsurface to get swept away by rain. We get to Siem Reap around mid-afternoon and try out the pool which is much nicer than you’d expect for a $20/night guesthouse (we weren’t expecting a pool at all). As Karen descends into the pool with her natural grace and poise she slips on the steps and gets a bruise on her bum which has been changing in size, shape and colour ever since.

Siem Reap is a bit like Cambodia’s Las Vegas (without the gambling, Americans, giant hotels etc.). It comes alive at night with everything lit up in bright colours. There are so many bars and restaurants that it seems as though there is one for every tourist. It is still only the very start of the busy season and we didn’t see it after 9pm (’re not ones for staying up late when it may really heat up.

The morning after arriving we head for Angkor Wat with our tuktuk driver, Chantra, who brought us from the bus station the previous day. Once you get in to a tuktuk the drivers like to hang on to you until you leave the town. You really need a tuktuk to get around all of the temples as the area is so vast and it only costs $15 a day. Chantra ate with us and slept when we were in the temples. He speaks good English and is learning German and would like to be a tour guide but it costs $3000 dollars to get your tour guide qualification which is a huge amount of money here.

The whole temple complex north of Siem Reap is referred to as Angkor Wat but Angkor Wat is actually a single temple in the complex albeit the largest, most famous and busiest. With Hollie’s guidance (she first came here 6 years ago) we go to the Angkor Wat temple first, it’s enormous - the largest religious structure in the world. You walk on a causeway over the 190m moat until you reach the gate in the wall around the temple and then you go through into a large courtyard with the actual temple itself in the middle. It’s only then that you start to get an idea of the scale of the place - the outer wall encloses an area of nearly 1 square kilometre.

After Angkor Wat we visit Bayon, famous for the giant faces that look out from towers all over the site. The faces are meant to be of a Buddhist bodhevista or ‘wisdom being’ but apparently they bear a strong resemblance to the king that built the palace - when you’re spending so much on your temple the temptation to personalize it in some way must be strong.

We end the first day at Ta Prohm. The temple made famous by its use as a location for the Tomb Raider film. The trees that have grown over the temple have been left in place here giving an impression of how all of the temples must have looked before the French started conserving and restoring them 100 years ago. After taking a few Indiana Jones and the Temple of Tomb Raider style photos we head back to meet up for a drink with Kim, Lori, Robert and Fiona (from cycling in Vietnam) at FCC Angkor (like the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh but quite a bit posher). K, L, R & F had come via an island off Vietnam and the Mekong but had arrived at Siem Reap within a day of us. It was good to see them again and catch up as we made full use of the FCC’s happy hour.

We arrange with Chantra to get picked up at 4:45 the next morning so we can go and watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat. Previously reliable, he fails to show as dawn approaches. At 5:00 the guesthouse tuktuk is mobilised to take us. We get half way to the temples when a tuktuk approaches rapidly from behind and draws level with us. It’s Chantra trying to persuade us to come back to him. Initially we say no but he is persistent and our new driver seems happy enough to take $5 and go back to finish his night’s sleep so we swap tuktuks. With our heads still full of tomb-raider we should really have changed tuktuks while they were still moving but, boringly, we waited for them to stop. We had been wondering what excuse Chantra might have and were reasonably satisfied with his ‘sick mother in hospital’ story.

Watching the sun rise over a temple is the sort of thing you imagine doing alone. In fact there were hundreds of other tourists doing exactly the same thing. It was still a nice experience although it doesn’t take the tropical sun long to rise. We were disappointed to find there wasn’t a specific ‘sun rising over temple’ setting on our camera - most other situations are catered for. Karen discovered the ‘super vivid’ setting at our sunset session at another temple which worked quite well and this was used extensively and inappropriately from then on. Hollie’s new camera by contrast has every setting possible although she has been seen passing it to Phil to make it do what she wants. After sunrise we had coffee and croissants from a sophisticated street vendor outside the temple, bumped into KLR & F again and visited a couple of other nearby temples. Exhausted, we gave up templing for the day and headed back to town for brunch and a lie down.

You can get one-day, three-day and seven-day passes for the temples. One day isn’t nearly long enough and seven days is too long so we had three-day passes. We set off late on the third day with the plan to see some temples we had missed and see the sun set from the top of one of the higher temples. I think the temples we saw today were nicer just by being less popular and less busy than the others.

Getting back to Phnom Penh we turned up at the Indian Embassy and were delighted to find that our Indian visas were ready. We only had a week without passports but it felt longer.

We did take a lot of photos, some looking very similar but some great ones in there - so everyone brace yourself - especially Gary as there will be a Tomb Raider section which we hope will get your creative juices flowing.

Next: Sihanoukville