If a picture is worth a thousand words is a thousand pictures worth an Angkor Wat?

Before I start talking about Siem Reap and Angkor Wat I realized that I didn’t actually talk much about Phenom Penh, which is unfair because I actually quite liked it as a city. I think it has been actually my favorite South East Asian city. The city is a bit on the dirty site, but it has a fun sort of vibe about it with a slight ‘I can still kill you whenever I want’ mixed in for good measure. This isn’t to say I ever felt unsafe in the city, but I was aware that the possibility did exist. The city also isn’t all that large so I was able to walk a good chunk of it my first day. The major tourist sites aside from the killing fields and S-21 weren’t amazing, the grand palace is overpriced and not impressive, and the museum is ok if you want to see a lot of statues, but the food was great and the people were very friendly. All and all I really liked the city.

So if Phenom Penh is great and I’ve really enjoyed Cambodia (although not as much as Laos) what about Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. When I was laying in a hammock on Don Dhet I was debating skipping Angkor Wat and if I was going to do that I figured I’d just skip Cambodia in general. I figured I had seen hundreds of temples on the trip and I knew it was going to be expensive so why not just hit a beach again for my last week. Well, I am very glad I didn’t. The town itself isn’t that great, although it has probably my favorite night market of the trip, but Angkor Wat makes up for it in spades. I decided to go for sunrise my first morning which meant meeting my tuk tuk driver at 5am. This was pretty crazy early even for me on this trip, but if I was going to do Angkor I might as well start off with a bang. Pulling up to Angkor Wat I started thinking to myself, ok, this is pretty impressive. There’s a man made moat and the temple is quite large. As I walked across the bridge and through the first door I then realized that I wasn’t entering the temple but just the front gate. The actually temple is another massive complex inside with another lake and is flanked by other smaller buildings. It’s more than a little impressive, it’s simply stunning. Then I began to realize that Angkor Wat is just the common name used to describe over 50 huge temples in the area. My mind then proceeded to blow out the side of my head. I know I was tough on people taking photos before, but that was a specific type of photo. My first day I took 1178 pictures. And no, that is not a typo, 1178 pictures. I think my tuk tuk driver thought I was a little crazy because apparently I did what most people do at Angkor Wat in three days in one: the mini loop, the grand loop, and then out to a couple of temples further away. They were simply incredible and most of them totally different and I wanted to see as many as I could. I also managed to stop by the landmine museum which was another gentle reminder of Cambodia’s past, and although it isn’t large, or something you don’t probably already know, it was a nice stop. My second Angkor day wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped though. I had hoped to split a guide with a couple of people to get a little more history but that never materialized. Instead I went out to a less visited set of temples which was nice but I wound up cutting my day short as it was simply going to cost too much money to do the rest of the things I wanted to see. I did manage another 150 pictures though.

One thing I’ve noticed about traveling around here is that gas is just as expensive as back home. This I’m sure cuts directly into the profit margin of all of the moto / tuk tuk / taxi drivers because although prices for transportation have gone up, you can only put them up so far before tourists simply won’t go. We want to feel like we aren’t being taken advantage of and the drivers are trying to make a living. It’s a very hard line to walk and understand. I know for example that I used $8 in gas my first day at Angkor to get around. That may be minimum wage back home but it could be a daily wage here. In the end I wound up paying $25 for transportation for the whole day. Did I pay too much? Maybe, maybe not, I’m not really sure. I do know that the driver was really nice and that he did drive me around for 13 hours, so in the end I felt comfortable paying that price. That being said, $25 is a huge amount of money for me relative to my daily spending on the rest of the trip. This is one of the few areas that it has hurt me traveling alone but I suppose it’s just one of the trade offs. Had I been traveling with a group I’m sure I wouldn’t have taken as many photos and probably wouldn’t have seen as many sites but it would have been cheaper.

Tomorrow I’ve decided to forgo my third day at Angkor and head back to Bangkok. I’m not sure yet if I’m just going to chill there for the last couple days or try and hit up one more place before I head out. Luckily I’ve got a long bus ride tomorrow to figure it out.