Feb 17 - This blog's going to try & roll a couple of days into one. It's not that we haven't been busy, but if you distill down our activities, it's basically been "Looking At Rocks", which is difficult to write about, and probably even harder to read! We're slightly templed-out - can you tell? Actually, that's a bit unfair, because the temples of Angkor are amazing, but you can overload on them.

On Saturday morning, I got up early to see the sunrise. Cheryl had threatened me with certain death if I woke her up on my way out, so at about 5AM I slipped into some clothes I'd laid out the night before, and tiptoed out of the room. Siem Reap is geared around sunrise - all the hotels start serving breakfast at about 4:30, and after a quick bite, I went out to reception, where our tuk-tuk driver was waiting. Angkor Wat is the normal sunrise spot, but Cheryl and I wanted to see it together, and so I decided to make for Srah Srang instead - which is set of pools with sandstone walls - man made, and covering about 2 square kilometers.

It was relatively quiet when I got there, but soon filled up a bit. There's a sort of main platform with a bit of statuary, a couple of palm trees, and a great view. The sky started off blue, but turned a whole set of different shades of pink as the sun came up. It was here that I had the first of a number of moments of Angkor photo rage! There are so many people here to see the temples that you're bound to get in each others' way now and again, but there seems to be a group of folks who make a habit of it - wandering into the middle of everyone's view or shot when they could easily move around it, and normally pausing for a spot of bottom-scratching or a phone call! Just as the sun came up, a latecomer screamed up on a moto and charged down to the water's edge, messing up everyone's view, including his own. He leaned on one of the palm trees, and chucked a chocloate wrapper on the floor, while munching and pointing. I prayed hard for a coconut to fall on his head, but I guess the gods of photographic karma hadn't clocked in for the day yet! In the end, I got some great photos of the sun coming up over the water and - amazingly - about five minutes after sun-up, the tour groups disappeared. Three or four of us were left to contemplate the lake in peace - it was pretty surreal looking out over this huge, thousand-year-old man-made dam, surrounded by forest, in near silence.

I say silence, but during the morning (actually, all the time at Angkor), there were a load of kids selling a whole range of wares. Scarves, t-shirts, cokes, and knock-offs of the Lonely Planet which look exactly the same as the real deal, but mysteriously only cost a dollar. The ones at Sra Srang had the most amazing sales patter, and a few of them must have been five or six years old. As soon as I'd arrived, I got mobbed. "Hey mister, you buy t-shirt!" "Where you from?" "You see me first. You buy from another girl you make me cry!" "You want coffee?". About five minutes before the sun came up, they quietened down. One little kid with a shaved head came over and said, very seriously; "OK - now we give you peace and quiet. But you remember, and later you buy, OK?". "Thanks, little man, but I'm not buying today," I said. With a wounded expression, the kid said; "I'm not a man, I'm a girl! You hurt my feelings, now you have to buy!" I felt awful! Despite all the chatter, they were actually not too pushy - most just seemed happy to talk about where you were from, or to practice their counting.

After sunrise another little girl came over and said - "Hey! You going to buy something or not? You have to hurry up, I have to go to school now!" I then fell for the line - "You have to buy from everyone or it's not fair," and went home with two scarves, two shirts and a hat, having eaten a second breakfast and bought a cup of coffee. Cheryl gave me the look when I got back - but luckily she liked her shirt!

Then it was lunch and a swim in the FCC pool, before we checked out of flashpacker heaven (boo hoo), and moved to the slightly more rustic (but considerably cheaper!) Pavillon Indochine. We dropped our bags off, and then got back in the tuk-tuk to head out to Banteay Kdei, a temple opposite Srah Srang. I won't try to describe it in detail, but it was amazing and - as one of the 'smaller' temples - almost empty of people. A group of land-mine amputees were busking, playing traditional Khmer music in a small band (this is quite a common site, there are LOADS of landmine victims in Cambodia; it's crazy). We stopped for a chat and made a donation, and they carried on making beatiful backround music for this abandonded site.

After Banteay Kdei, we headed to Angkor Wat, which is roughly in the middle of the main set of temple sites, and is about 15km north of Siem Reap. Again - Angkor Wat is too large and complex to describe, but it's really, really worth seeing, and you need more than just a couple of hours. It's one of the few archeological sites I've ever seen that lives up to the hype. You're also pretty much free to walk around and climb to the more remote parts of the site - and it's great not to have fences and cordons all over the place. Angkor Wat gets most of it's visitors at sunrise, so again it was much quieter in the afternoon. The temple faces West, and we got some great shots of the sun going down over the crypts. After sunset, we puttered back to our hotel in the tuk-tuk, ate and crashed early - as we'd made a plan to meet the same driver at 5:30AM to see the famed Angkor Wat sunrise.

The next day, the alarm went off at 5-ish. We splashed our faces and blundered down the stairs. It was still dark as we set off, but the breeze was warm, and a line of lights followed us out of Siem Reap - the headlamps of other tuk-tuks and taxis. Tuk-tuks are about $10 for a whole day, which is pretty good value, as that normally runs for about 14 hours! The hordes arrived just after we did. Every day or 2-day tour of the temples starts with sunrise at Angkor Wat, but you can really see why - it's pretty spectacular. We actually stayed outside the temple, catching the sun rising over the towers in the distance, and the reflections in the moat. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people crossed the causeway as we looked on, moving inside for a view of the inner pools, and by sunrise itself we were two of only a handful of people on the outside wall.

After Angkor, we had breakfast, and then headed over to Angkor Thom - a huge, walled city which contains several large temples, including Bayon (where the towers are carved with over two hundred smiling faces - each about 15ft high). We also saw the Bauphon temple, the Terraces of the Elephant, and Phimenakas. Angkor Thom is a huge complex, over ten square kilometers in area, and the gates are enormous, with giant statues depicting the Churning of the Ocean of Milk on either side of the main causeway. Again - too huge to describe, but definately a place to see before you die!

We had lunch, and then headed on to Preah Kahn and then to Ta Prohm, where the Tomb Raider movies were filmed. Everywhere we went (outside of the temples proper), we were surrounded by good natured little kids trying to flog us things from their parents' stalls. "You can't buy from another girl - I saw you first!" "Want postcards? Ten for a dollar. One ... two ... three ... four ... five ... six ... seven ... eight ... nine ... ten!" One little guy was trying to get Cheryl to buy a flute, and he was playing away on it, sounding quite tuneful. "You play very well," Cheryl said. "Play. Yes, I can play," retorted the kid. "But can you buy!?". I don't know if it's good or bad that kids are involved in this sort of vending business, but many of them seemed to spend half the day in school (most Cambodian schools run two shifts, morning and afternoon to let the kids fit into their parents' schedule). They were really friendly and not agressive; much more relaxed than anywhere else we've been in the world.

After seeing some more great temples, we headed up Phnom Baekeng - a pyramid shaped structure built on top of a hill, and a great sunset spot. In the distance, you can see the towers of Angkow Wat glowing in the setting sun's light, and you've got to marvel at the resources and planning required to build an enormous stone temple on the top of a (pretty steep) hill with fairly rustic technology. The steps are narrow and cut to a huge gradient (something like 70 degrees), so it's a bit of a mission clambering up or down, but there were still about a thousand people up there. As we slowly picked our way down, Cheryl said; "It's a wonder we haven't seen anyone fall." At that moment, a middle aged Japanese lady came flying past us, dropping ten feet to the next platform. She seemed OK, apart from a large egg-sized lump that instantly sprang up on her head, and after checking she was OK (she was with a big group), we gingerly made our way back down the hill.

We'd decided to eat in Siem Reap town that night - our hotel was a few kilometers away from the centre. We asked our driver to drop us off at dinner and then realised that he had taken a slightly worrying shine to us. He'd made us take some group photos with him at lunchtime (I was a bit concerned when he put his hand on my knee for one of them), and he pulled in at a Fuji Printshop on the way, so that we could get them printed off for him - to "make a good memory". He then asked for our home address and phone numbers ... We thought this was a little weird, but that maybe this was just the way things were in Cambodia. He looked a bit disappointed when we asked him not to wait for us, but we agreed to meet him early the next day, and made our own way home after a great dinne