SIEM REAP 14TH - 16TH JANUARY 2007

Visitors come to Siem Reap to visit 'Ankor', and as Ankor is becoming more and more popular on the world travel map right now, Siem Reap is becoming busier and more alive. Ankor Wat is only 6km from Siem Reap so it make for a perfect base. The town itself is vert attractive with lots of guesthouses and plentiful bars and resturants.

Our second day we went to Ankor, You can buy a one, three, or seven day pass. One day was $20 and we thought enough to see the main temples. Ankor is a kingdom of temples and spiritual devotion. The Cambodian god-kings of old each strove to better their ancesters in size, scale and symmetry, culminating in the world largest religious building - Ankor Wat, and one of the worlds weirdest - The Bayon. The hundreds of temples surviving today are but the sacred skeleton of the vast political, religious and social centre of an empire that stretched from Burma to Vietnam, a city that, at its zenith boasted a population of one million when London was a scrawny town of 50,000. The temples of Ankor are the heart and soul of the kingdom of Cambodia, and the main attraction of visitors coming to Cambodia. The Ankorian period spans more than 600 years from AD 802 to 1432, during which the temples of Ankor were built.

The temples are absolutely amazing to see and walk around, they are huge and amazingly carved, and even more increadible, knowing there was no machinery or modern day tools like what we have today. The sheer man-power must have been imence.

We decided to go on our own by bycycle as we thought it would be a nice way to do it. We left Siem Reep at 5am to see sun rise at Ankor Wat ( a bit energetic for us but we figured it was a once in a life time deal and should make the effort). Once at Ankor we spent the day doing, what is called, 'the big circuit', which is a 26km circuit of the central temples around Ankor Wat. It was a great day, a real history over-load, but nothing like we've ever seen before.

The morning after Ankor we took a mini van to the border at Poipet. This took about six hours, in a crap vehical, on really bad dirt track roads, we must of been traverlling at about 20km an hour, so frustrating! We then did the visa stamp thing and crossed into Thailand. Once through, we caught a bus to Bangkok, four and a half hours. We had a clean air-con bus and silky-smooth tarmack roads, it felt great and SOooo luxurious to us.