Day 4: Sunrise at Angkor Wat

Siem Reap - Saturday 18/12

The first shock to the system this morning as we had to be up at 5 am for the trip out to the famous temple of Angkor Wat for the sunrise.

Dawn emerges slowly out of the darkness over the towers of the temple - we'll let the photos speak for themselves on that one.

The next two hours were spent exploring the vast reaches of this massive temple - Angkor Wat is the largest Hindu temple in Cambodia, built in the 12th century. You climb to three different levels of the temple, with the highest level being the five towers - one in each corner and the largest central tower being the centre of the shrine. The top level is the most holy of the temple, and we were fortunate that visitors were allowed up the final steep climb to the highest level on the day of our visit.

Angkor Wat is simply spectacular in it's scale and the endless corridors of carvings that were all done by hand by 1000 artists over many years as the temple was built. There are also some sections where the bas reliefs on the walls were just never finished - something interrupted life at Angkor Wat just before every final detail of the temple was completed.

After the spectacular views of the grounds from the top of the temple, we descended (slowly !) and moved on to visit Bayon temple.
Bayon temple is much smaller, but well known for it's sculptures of the "four Buddhas" that adorn each of the four faces of each tower in the temple. There are nearly 300 faces of Buddha around the temple. This is a compact temple, but with much narrower corridors and walk ways ... by the time we got here all the other "soft" tourists who had gone home for breakfast were back, so it was quite crowded.

After a very early morning, back to the hotel for nanna naps and lunch ... the plan for this evening is to visit the night markets for ... SHOPPING !! We expect six girls to go nuts in the myriad of staffs and hawkers in the markets ... and we'll try and squeeze in dinner.

More to come in the next few days !