[R]: Tomb Raider and the Legend of Angkor Waaaaat?!

Little known fact: in Siem Reap temples outnumber people three to one. And I'm pretty sure I'm going to see half of them today.

I was out the door at 4:45am this morning. BRUTAL. Luckily, my rando tuk tuk driver showed up on time, as promised. Today I'm doing the so-called "Small Circuit" of temples, which is a route that includes about six temples. Before you can visit any of the temples, though, you need to purchase a pass. I assume the money for the pass goes toward the upkeep of these temples, but who knows. We arrived at the place that sells passes about 20 minutes later. There was already a big line but my tuk tuk driver just went around to the other side of the building and poof, no lines on this side. We were in and out in three minutes flat. Next stop: sunrise at Angkor Wat.

If I showed you what this looked like the first time I walked down it at 5:15am, you'd just see a big black rectangle

Angkor Wat. And a lake that not really a lake. Just a big puddle. Because
I came at the wrong time of year. Because I am the worst world traveler.

Angkor Wat is, to many people, the most famous temple in Siem Reap. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which means... I dunno, something important I guess (I had seen that designation at a bunch of the places I went to in Bangladesh and India but never really gave much thought to it). It was pitch black when we arrived. So dark that I could barely see where I was going, so I just followed the crowd that was already gathering. We walked down a pretty long stone path. There were already people soliciting me to be my guide, which I turned down (but in retrospect I wish I hadn't; it turns out they could have been my guide for the whole day, which would have been nice). I walked through this huge stone gateway into the main courtyard area and kept walking toward where I saw a crowd of people gathering in front of what looked like a small lake. Behind the lake was Angkor Wat (I mean... this whole thing was Angkor Wat, but the temple part was behind the lake). I imagine this is where the best photo spot is for sunrise photos since a lot of these people are carrying fancy cameras.

As it turns out... we didn't get to see sunrise at Angkor Wat because it was cloudy. Womp womp. It just got continually brighter and brighter until at some point you were like "ok, the sun is probably up by now." After desperately hoping the clouds would break for about an hour or so, I gave up and started to check out some of the rest of the place. There was this beautiful music hanging in the background so I went to check it out and eventually discovered the source.


All of Angkor Wat is a temple, but it turns out part of this land is still actively used for religious purposes.

Yea... that's a horse. What?

I had been here for a few hours already and I was starting to get hungry. Luckily there was food art this place, because of course they're selling food at this place. If you haven't noticed by now, I hate eating alone. I've tried not hating it, and I'm hoping this whole trip will help me not hate it as much as I do, but right now I still am not a big fan of it. After the success that was yesterday, I figured I'd try this again. There happened to be another blonde girl sitting alone at a table so I went up to her and asked her if I could join her to which she also responded with a smile and a yes.

That's right dear readers: two for two. High five, up top!

From left to right:
breakfast girl's shoe, my hand, MYSTERY TOUR card

This girl happened to be from one of the Nordic countries and was currently doing some sort of medical internship in Thailand. Right now she was just doing a little traveling before heading back to Thailand in... three hours. Over the course of breakfast, she told me that the day before she went on a "Mystery Tour" with a guy that was recommended to her by another friend. It's a motorcycle tour around Siem Reap and it's tailored to what you want to see. It sounded equal parts sketchy and awesome, so she gave me the dude's card. Sounds like it could be fun.

About 45 minutes later she had to run to catch her flight and I wanted to continue exploring Angkor Wat. We said our goodbyes and I realized... Angkor Wat is huge. I mean... HUGE. So I decided that I would indeed be enlisting the services of a guide. So I walked allllllll the way back down that path and found a guide. His English was good, thankfully. Good enough to get the point across, at least. If nothing else, at least now I had someone who knew all the best photo spots (turns out dude wasn't very good at holding the camera straight. Whoops). I could walk you through all the stuff I saw, but to be honest, I really don't remember a lot of it, so here are a bunch of pretty pictures with moderately amusing captions:

How such a beautiful covering of a public
statue hasn't been stolen yet is beyond me

This won't be that impressive once 3D printing takes off, but right now...
WOW. Some dude spent a loooooooong time making those carvings.

I learned how to pick up building while at the Taj Mahal

After making my way around the outer layers of the Angkor Wat complex, I finally got to the center, where the main temple-y part is. Remember how I said it was huge? Well... I wasn't kidding. This thing is massive. More photos:

It's reallllly hard to get the whole thing in one picture

You can walk up the steps to get closer to the top. It's
pretty impressively high up there. Luckily they created
some slightly more modern stairs that still make you think
you're going to die as you ascend them.

The central spire. I didn't know I knew the word "spire"
until I tried to think of a caption for this photo. Look at me go.

The view from up high

View of the complex from the back/right (back/left? Back diagonal.)

For whatever reason, the tour guides aren't allowed up top (at least that's what he said...) so that was the end of our engagement. Worth it. I walked around the outside of Angkor Wat for a little longer before heading back out to find my tuk tuk driver. It turns out I spent like... four hours here.

The next stop was a temple called Bayon. This one is famous for having a gazillion (216) faces carved into it's stone... facades. Ba dum chhhhh. More photos:

I hope the woman with raised arms got a memorable photo out of this

BIG FACES

BIGGER FACES

After big face temple we went to a see a bunch of other temples. I'm not going to lie... they kind of all started to blend together in my mind after a while. There really only so much ancient temple you can see before you're like "oh, another temple." But for the sake of completeness, here are a handful of more photos:

Some temple

Some giant Buddha

No pun intended

Some other temple

Some other other temple

At this point we broke from our temple tour for lunch. After I finished eating, I went out to find my driver, but didn't see him. It turns out he was in another section of the restaurant, which I assume is where all the drivers go. He was still eating, so I just went back outside to wait. While I was waiting, a little girl approached me selling postcards. This has been a sadly common theme today. At every temple site, there are children selling trinkets. Postcards, souvenirs, small things. But children. They've all got their sales pitches down. And they recite them in English (and I've heard from another traveler I met that they can do these pitches in several other languages too). I asked the girl how old she was. She told me she was 13. Want to try that again, clearly-no-more-than-8-years-old girl? I asked her if she was in school. She said yes, but that right now it was holiday break, but that she goes back to school next week. Sounds suspect. She then tried again to sell me some post cards, but I had to keep saying no.

[Update: a friend of mine recently wrote an article for Slate about how giving money to children selling things / begging for money is pretty much the worst thing you can do, which I highly recommend you read: Keep The Change]

Big tree, meet big wall

After my driver returned to the tuk tuk, we went to my favorite temple of the day, Ta Prohm. This one happens to be the one where they filmed scenes from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, but that's not why it was my favorite. This place was a beautiful melding of man and nature. To quote my friend KB, "the true appeal of Ta Prohm was not the temple itself but the wrestling match between nature and temple that occurred at the sight." There are literally trees growing out of the walls here. When the temple was "rediscovered" in the early 1900s by French explorers, they decided to leave it largely intact to preserve the beauty of this unnaturally natural wonder. 

It's hard to capture in photos how crazy
this really is

Right before I was about to take the iconic Ta Prohm photo in front of one particular doorway... the camera app on my phone stopped working. lkjdgljdkfg;lkjdfg;oierut!??!??!! Worst. Though perhaps a blessing in disguise. All day long, I had been so concerned with taking photos of everything that I think it took away from actually experiencing the temples for the historic works of art that they are. I spent the rest of my time in Ta Prohm actually enjoying my time in the temple and not worrying about finding the best shot.

Ta Prohm is a one-way flow-of-traffic temple. You enter from one side and come out the other. As I continued walking down the path, I found a guy (not child) selling some books of the temples. They were really, really nice books so I decided to buy one. I think it'll be a nice keepsake from my time in Siem Reap.

Houses! On STILTS!

After that we went to a few more temples, but by this point, I was pretty templed-out so I didn't spend too much more time there. And so we came to the end of our temple run. This was supposed to the end of my time with the tuk tuk driver. But last night JS invited me to join him and another hostel dweller IR for a boat ride to the Floating Village. So I negotiated with the tuk tuk driver to keep him around a little longer and we took a 40-minute drive out to where I could meet up with JS and IR. Luckily, my tuk tuk driver knew where to go because I didn't have the slightest clue. When he stopped the car, there was a kind of janky-looking building and a river running alongside the road. I got there about 30 minutes early so I just hung out with the driver in the tuk tuk. He was kind enough to offer for me to take a nap in his tuk tuk because he knew I was exhausted, but... that sounded like a bad idea so I politely declined. When JS and IR got there, I bought a ticket and the three of us hopped onto a private boat, complete with our own 18-year-old (-looking, could have been anywhere from 16 to 22) captain.

Our boat, in all its glory. I'm pretty sure someone made this
in 20 minutes from a model boat kit and salvaged
wood from countless previous failed attempts.

We took a nice leisurely ride up the river for about 30 minutes until we reached the so-called Floating Village. I didn't really know what it was, but I had heard from a few people that it was a thing to do in Siem Reap. When we got close, I understood why it was called that. The houses here were all on stilts. Huge stilts. When people walk out of their houses, they need to get into boats to go anywhere. I've never seen anything like it before, ever. There were some women in boats that floated around selling goods out of their boats. All of the houses had ladders leading down into the water. It's the monsoon season now, but when the dry season comes, all of this water disappears and they take the ladders down to the ground just like normal.

We arrived at a docking station where we paid a few extra dollars for a canoe ride. This is something they can only do in the wet season, otherwise the water isn't deep enough. We donned orange life vests and very carefully climbed on board. I say very carefully, because one small slip would have meant capsizing the boat. 

With this jacket on,
if you lost me in the water,
I wouldn't even be mad;
I'd just be impressed.

Our lovely canoe woman. There's a small child in front of her somewhere.

Gotta say, pretty impressed with the engineering ingenuity here

We are literally canoeing through treetops

We took a very nice, relaxing ride for about 30 minutes through the water surrounding these houses and in a forest-y-looking area. It took a minute to realize that we were actually canoeing through treetops! Needless to say, I really enjoyed the ride. The woman who was paddling was probably in her 30s or 40s and I didn't realize until the very end that her small child had been sitting in front of her on the boat the whole time. We (again) very carefully disembarked back at our dock/restaurant, but we didn't stick around to eat anything. Instead, we found our boat and we went off to the next destination, a nearby lake about 10 minutes away.

The lake was gorgeous and it was pretty late in the day, so we asked the driver if he wouldn't mind just hanging out for a little while so we could see the sun set over the lake. He seemed fine with it, so we just hung out out there for a while while the sun set over a partially cloudy sky. I can honestly say it was one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen. The colors were... different than they are at home. The smog in Los Angeles ironically makes for incredibly beautiful sunsets, but here it was as if the sunset had been painted using a different color palette.

Magnificent.

After the sun went down, we made the 45-minute boat ride back to where we started. It wasn't the smoothest ride, but there was certainly something very serene about it. The fading light giving way to almost complete darkness. The bats flying overhead. It just felt like the perfect end to the day.
I hopped back in my tuk tuk and we all made our way back to the hostel. When I got back, I gave the Mystery Tour guy a call and he said he was free tomorrow, so we setup a time. All set for tomorrow!

CONTINUE ON to Siem Reap Part 3: The Mystery Tour and the War Museum

Just... magnificent