Temples and shit

Still doing very badly at catching up with my blogging but I will endeavor.....

So time to leave Thailand for the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, we booked ourselves what we though was a nice easy all the way through bus and were up bright and early for our 7am pick up.... 1 and a half hours later we were still waiting, what they call 'thai time' over here.

Our border crossing was a relatively distressing experience where, despite about 3 years backpacking between us we managed to fall for the classic exchange rate con on the border, I knew that guy was talking crap but somehow let myself get carried along by it,, too old to backpack clearly. Anyway we lost the equivalent of about 4 pints in London so not life threatening and arrived in Siem Reap as hardened hagglers and bull shit detectors.

We'd picked up a random dutch guy and a the most mature and interesting 18 year old brit backpacker on the way and proceeded to drag them around town to find hostels that didn't exist. Anyway we soon found somewhere not in 'the bible' aka lonely planet but good enough and headed out to revisit a town I had had an amazing time in lat time I was there. Suffice to say the Angkor What? bar seemed a lot louder than last time I was there.. ah well as I said too old to backpack really. Should probably change the name of this blog to that....

Next day we decided to be intrepid and visit the famous temples by bike, a lovely idea and great exercise but managed to give the poor Irish boy heatstroke which took him out for about 24 hours bless him.

Revisiting the temples was just as stunning as the last time I was here, the intricate stone carvings everywhere you turn, giant alien trees slowly trying to take them back by growing giants roots through them and just the sheer scale of these ancient Khmer kings to show how good they were. I read an awful lot of descriptions of the wheres and why fores which I have immediately forgotten except the fact that all their names ended in varman, still for me its not really about the facts but just soaking up the atmosphere of the place.

Best experience of the two days we spent in the complex was sneaking back into the main Angkor Wat temple after it closed and watching dusk set in with absolutely no one else around, not a common experience in the major attraction of Cambodia which is usually full of Japanese and american coach tours. It was pretty special.

Our whistle stop visit was over too quick, having learned our lesson we did the trip back without an all through bus, a much more peaceful trip. So back to Bangkok with us and one final night before heading off to Australia and to be honest we were quite relieved at the prospect of not having to worry about being ripped off all the time of sweat buckets before even finishing breakfast. It was lovely and totally weird to bump into Liz on a soi off the Khao San road, who I had met in Morocco about 1year and a half before. The world is too small sometimes.

Australian adventures with the extended Leyden family to come soon, also will upload an album full of photos of Cambodia to flikr for you to look at if you fancy, I know it looks like a lot of old rock but it reall was very impressive in person.