After a week in Laos, we flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia, the town outside of Angkor Wat.We expected Angkor Wat and the other Angkor temples to be incredible - it is considered one of the historical wonders of the world, after all.But the Angkor temples far surpassed either of our expectations.We watched sunset the first night from the steps of one of the temples and we both felt a bit overwhelmed by the number of tourists and the heat (much hotter than Thailand or Laos).As a result, we decided to forego sunrise the following morning (a major tourist activity) and hired a guide for the following day so that we could visit some of the less-touristy temples with a bit of direction and learn more about the history than can be found in guidebooks alone.The decision turned out to be a good one - our guide was wonderful and we ended up having an absolutely fantastic day.The temples we visited were awesome in their size and grandeur but also moving and detailed in the delicate stone carvings, the offerings to the Buddha statues throughout the temples, the active lives of the monks who still live inside Angkor Wat, and the sophistication of the art and architecture.

The time at Angkor Wat was also moving for us because it gave us our first glimpse into the enormous toll that the war in the 1970's had and continues to have on the country.In a very physical reminder, Angkor Wat itself is market by the war - only five of the original eleven towers are left after bombing and the outside walls are pock-marked with bullet holes.Pol Pot hid inside the Wat at the end of his reign and so the incoming armies peppered the temples with bombs, grenades, and bullets.We felt saddened to see the scars that the war left on these beautiful ancient cities.Even sadder to see were the scars left on the Cambodians themselves - seems like a young country with very few elderly as nearly three million people were killed in the four years that the Khmer Rouge was in power and most of them were older people who could not be indoctrinated with the communist message as well as the young.There are also many landmine victims without limbs in the streets - a testimony to the ongoing and far-reaching horrors of war.As Americans, we felt especially responsible for understanding more of what happened in this country and the role our country played in south-east Asia.We both feel sheepish at how little we learned in our history classes about this part of the world and the relatively recent and very bloody position the U.S. held here.We are doing our best to learn more by going on to Phnom Penh to visit the killing fields and museums there.