Hello from Siem Reap!!

Well we arrived here after a good 6 hour bus journey from Kompong Cham. We picked up a tuk-tuk driver off the bus to take us to a guesthouse. Ended up getting quite a good deal on a hotel, so we dumped our bags and set off to explore Siem Reap and grab some lunch. There is a nearby market that we took a walk through selling all your usual stuff. We then came onto “Pub Street” which is exactly what is says, a street full of pubs. We found somewhere to grab some lunch and have a couple of drinks in the sunshine.

At night we decided to go out for a couple drinks and experience the nightlife. We ended up meeting two guys Jack and James that we met in Halong Bay, Vietnam. We stuck with them having quite a few drinks before moving onto the next bar and meeting Dave the Scouser we keep banging into. The buckets of Vodka/Redbull began......

The following day was a write off, we must be getting old as our hangovers are the worst. We spent the day watching tv and lounging around. We ventured out for a pizza but it wasn’t long before we had to come back to our bed haha.

We got up nice and early the following day as it was our first day of the Angkor Wat Temples, which are the largest religious buildings in the world. We were not sure what to expect as we have seen a lot of temples on our travels but we were very impressed.

Our first stop was Angkor Wat itself. Angkor Wat means “temple that is a city” which gives you an idea of the size of this temple. It took 300,000 workers and 6000 elephants to construct. All throughout the temple there were carvings everywhere, almost every wall and even on the ceilings. We took a good hour to walk around the grounds but you could have spent a lot longer here walking through the endless corridors looking at all the different carvings. It really was amazing to see.

Our next stop was Angkor Thom which is the second biggest temple in Angkor Wat. It was almost just as impressive, it is 10 sq km in size and we only seen a very small part of it. At one point it supported a population of one million people. Again the carvings were everywhere, all throughout the temple. We took a walk up to the top of the temple where you could overlook the grounds, it was really impressive.

We then got taken to more temples in the area, all very impressive and unique in their own way. The day just seemed to fly by and it was time to head back to our hotel. That night we decided to treat ourselves to a Mexican after our day of walking around the temples. It was amazing, J had fajitas and B had enchiladas, both delicious. We went back to temple bar but just to have a soft drink and play some pool before heading back to get some sleep before our second day of temples.

The following morning we got up early for day two of Angkor Wat. We did what they call the Grand Tour which involved seeing another 6 temples. They were all very good to see, not quite as impressive at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom but they still good. We had a lot more kids following us around trying to sell us postcards or bracelets “Mr two for $1” is all we heard all day haha. Although we did meet a really nice little girl that impressed us by being able to count to 10 in Cambodian, English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese....pretty much any language we suggested she spoke and she was only about 6 haha, very impressed!!
Our plan was to stay at the temples to watch the sunset but the weather quickly changed and turned into a thunderstorm so that plan was abandoned and we headed back to our hotel. The rain didn’t really stop the rest of the night so we made a quick dash at night to get some local street food and went back to our hotel so J could watch the golf!!

We have an early 6am start tomorrow where we head to Battambang for a couple of days.

Siem Reap has been really nice, Angkor Wat being the main attraction here. But the city itself it pretty cool.

J+B