If I have to look at one more temple I'm going to scream!

Today we got up at 4.15am (yes, apparently that is an actual time that you can wake up) and got a tuk tuk to Angkor Wat to watch the sun rise. Sitting in a tuk tuk weaving through traffic on a road full of potholes with dust blowing in my face is not the way I would choose to wake up.

We arrived just after 5am and had to negotiate walkways over lakes and uneven ground in the pitch black. But it was worth it. The sun rise was amazing and the temple was pretty impressive to look around when the sun came up too. I took tons and tons of pictures, will upload when I get a chance.

We then went on to visit Angkor Thom where we were dropped at several other temples and monuments - Bayon, Baphuon, terrace of the leper king, terrace of the elephants, kleangs, phimeanakas, ta nei, ta prohm and tep pranam. That was 8 full hours of walking around temples - and it was only lunch time! When we got to the last few we had seen enough temples to last us a lifetime but felt bad telling our guide we didn't want to see anymore, so every time he slowed down to let us out, we looked at each other with a 'oh god, not another one' look and dutifully smiled, got out, took 4000 pictures, spent 10 minutes trying to find our driver again (who was asleep every time!) and got back in the tuk tuk hoping that was the last one.

We also somehow got conned into buying not one, but two rubbings of some famous temple reliefs. We spent the whole day resisting people trying to sell us guide books, flutes, postcards, scarfs, water, food, tiny carved elephants (mainly children) and lost our resolve by the end of the day and made the ultimate error of making eye contact with one of them and engaging in conversation (anyone walking through the gauntlet of charity workers outside 250 can relate to this).The guy spent 10 mins telling us about all the rubbings so we ended up having to buying one, but of course he had no change, so we had to get two - happy Christmas mum... ;)

After getting back we checked into our new very posh hotel. It has a huge swimming pool so we plan on relaxing by that all day tomorrow. It's nice to have a bit of luxury before we go back to slumming it the backpacker guesthouses.

We also went out for a quick dinner this eve and Robin was pleased to finally get his happy pizza! Although he wants an ecstatic one tomorrow apparently ;)