Angkor Wat and the longest adventure

The night following our first day at the temples called for a street foot massage. We got 20 minutes for $1. No one complained about that. We walked around the market again. The previous night we bought a few things from a really nice girl so that night we went and found her to say hi and get a picture with her. Then we finally went back to the guest house and crashed.

Sitting in our chairs on the sidewalk waiting for our massages to begin

Our favorite stall owner at the Night Market.

The next day at the temples was an early one. Our (new and improved) tuk-tuk driver picked us up at 5 in the morning so we could make it to Angkor Wat for sunrise. Although there were a lot of people there for the same reason, the early morning was definitely worth it. The air was cool, the sky was beautiful, and the sun came up right over Angkor Wat.

We wandered around Angkor Wat for a long time. Using our guidebook we looked at all of the galleries of carvings on the wall in chronological order. We eventually made it to the stairs to go to the very top. The original stairs are really really steep (the tower symbolizes heaven and the steep stairs symbolize the hard journey to get there). Luckily they have built less steep stairs over them (when I say less steep I mean really steep instead of really really steep). Going to the top is a bit of an ordeal (for some more than others): you have to have your shoulders and knees covered and you can only be up there for 15 minutes. It was really cool and totally worth risking my life going up the stairs.

The sky was gorgeous on our way to Angkor Wat.

I'm pretty sure he was taking pictures for a future issue of National Geographic. Let's just assume I'm right.

We are sweaty even at 5 in the morning.

An example of the carving in one of the galleries.

You can see some stairs up to the tower on the right. Those are the king's stairs so they aren't as steep. Apparently it's easier for him to get to heaven...

After Angkor Wat we came to the temple pictured below. (I don't remember what it's called). After this temple we started following a trail and ended up wandering through some ruins that were basically in the jungle. We kept following signs that said "Way of visit" and we kept finding really cool things. And with our handy-dandy guidebook we learned a lot about everything we saw. It was so cool and very interesting. I don't have pictures of anything else because my camera battery died, but trust me, it was cool. After a while we felt like we had wandered kind of far and there weren't any other tourists around.

We finally saw a map and realized that we had taken the "alternate route" instead of the "main route". Who knows how far we had walked. We followed the route to take us to the last couple things we wanted to see, but after that we had no idea where we were. Well, we knew where we were, and there were lots of other people around, but we didn't know where our tuk-tuk driver was. We were so tired and so hot and so thirsty, we couldn't walk another step. I finally called Sry (tuk-tuk driver) and told him where we were. He told us to stay there and he would come pick us up. We were so happy to see him!

He took us to his friend's restaurant (there are tons of places to eat by all the temples), and got us a discount on lunch. We sat and talked to him for a loooong time. He told us all about his family and his life and about Cambodia and some of the political things going on here. It was so interesting. I loved it. Sry is awesome. He's learning German so he can talk to German tourists, he's really involved in informing other Cambodians about the political situation and how it needs to change, and he's really nice and really funny.

After lunch we went to a few more temples and then back to the city. After resting for a while, we went to a new place for dinner. It was a long walk from our guest house and even though the food was fine, the place stressed me out. There were huge crickets everywhere (one on my chair to begin with, and then a couple more hit me mid-flight while I was eating), and the food made me sick. After dinner we got foot massages again and then headed home early.