Entries about angkorwat

James and I are currently on Thailand! After a grueling travel day we are in Koh Tao and have started our diving course. Tomorrow we do our first dive!

Getting here involved a very very choppy ferry ride that left about half the boat sea sick.

We arrived in Phnom Penh on the 8th and spent 1 day there. It was actually a surprisingly pretty city center. But the rest of the city was not so great. We went to the "killing fields" museum which was a pretty eye opening exhibit in Pol Pot. A dictator I knew very little about.

Next we went to Siem Reap. A small city just outside of Angkor Wat where we met up with two of my friends from college who are also doing SE Asia. We did 3 days in Angkor Wat which is one of the 7 wonders of the world and was pretty amazing. I'm just going to upload a bunch of photos. Angkor Wat is a series of about 30 temples from the Khmer empire. A civilization that is not taught in western classes but managed to create these temples.

A fair number of these temples were lost in the jungle for some time. Resulting in trees growing out of the temples. Which was some of the coolest be parts. When the French Colonized Cambodia they also did a fair amount of "restoration" and UNESCO has spent the last 20 years trying to fix all the damage they did. Finally the Khmer Rouge also inhabited these temples and also did a lot of damage. Luckily UNESCO is now running the show and there is a lot of work currently going on to continue to restore these temples.

The temples themselves were great. We were free to walk around and explore. Lots of tourists in the main temples. But some of the smaller ones were basically empty.

We got around the temples using tuk tuks. Which cost $20 total for the 4 us to get a driver for about 8 hours.

A quick view of the tourists scene.

This temple was not particularly interesting, but the path went through some cool swamps.

Finally we went to the main temple at sunrise. It was packed but very cool.

Here is the crowd: