Angkor Wat

Largest religious building in the world. Can I say more?

So since we lost a full day of touristing, we have to change our plans a little bit. We opt to book a private, English-speaking guide for the day of temple touring, so we'd get the most out of it. And boy, did we!

We all took a tuk-tuk out to the temples, arming ourselves with insect repellent and our very expensive Ex Officio insect-repelling clothing. We're still taking our malaria meds, but much of Cambodia is still malaria territory, so long sleeves/pants are recommended.

The Ex Officio clothes, by the way, don't seem to work, nor does our insect repellent. At least, Scott didn't get bitten, but he never does. I have red ugly bites all the way up and down my legs. Sigh. Maybe it would've been worse without bug spray, at least.

Our guide, named So Pengthai (I think) tells us to call him Thai. Easy enough. He is a wealth of information, about the temples, Cambodian history, religious beliefs then and now, art, current events, politics, inter-country relations in southeast Asia, social mores and customs today...anything we want to ask about, which is awesome! We get SO much more out of the carvings at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom/Bayon than we would have otherwise. Fascinating! We all drive back to town for lunch at the Butterfly Garden (restaurant within a butterfly sanctuary, but we don't actually see many butterflies, disappointingly enough). Then more templing in the afternoon, ending at Ta Prohm (the mostly ruined temple with all the ginormous tree roots growing all over things - you've seen photos).


We take tons of photos, which I'm sure will never be quite as good as the ones we've seen at art fairs. But that's fine. Not too many tourists around really - Thai says this tourist season has been really down, which is bad for income in this town, but nice for us! Also, it's unseasonably cool - probably only about 80 or 85, which with the humidity is still plenty warm for us, but nowhere near the 95-100 degrees we'd been expecting.

In the evening, we head off to the (touristy) Apsara Dance Evening. It's a large buffet of mediocre Khmer food (lots of variety though, including about 16 types of those gelatinous desserts I never liked even as a child). Seriously, have I EVER been to a buffet with no desserts I liked? It's very out of character for me. And then an hour of classical Khmer dance - pretty costumes, and a couple of the dancers seem pretty good, while others don't seem as unison/rehearsed as I would have expected. Anyway, we would have enjoyed the dancing more if we could have understood the narration, but it took about 30 minutes before we even realized she was speaking English, and even then we could only figure out about one word in ten.



Very tired, Scott still a bit tummy-ish, so we head home.