Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia

We flew into Siem Reap, Cambodia from Bangkok on an atr72, the flight was less than an hour and uneventful. We processed through immigration by getting a visa at the airport, we forgot to get a passport size photo for the visa but they took care of that for an extra $2 usd.

It's interesting that everything priced here is in U.S. dollars, they take the local currency but there's no need for it. Sometimes you get the local currency as change. We had a one hundred dollar bill, a lot of money in Cambodia that was hard to spend, so best to bring $20 bills or smaller.

We had our hotel, the viroth, arrange transportation and our car and driver was waiting for us when we were done with immigration and customs. The hotel is moderately priced, the rooms and service is very good. They don't have a tour desk so we went to the neighboring soria moria hotel. The staff there was great and we booked a full day tour of the Angkor area with them.

The next morning we had breakfast at the viroth at 7 a.m. then met our tour guide and driver, then off to the temples in a car that I think was a toyota camry. Our driver didn't seem to speak much english but the tour guide's english was outstanding as was his knowledge of the area and it's history. He reminded me of our guides at desert adventures in Las Vegas who do a great job for us day in and out.

Our driver Tony and guide Lee took us to Angkor Wat first. The temple was originally built in the 12th century as a hindu temple, it's now Buddhist with two monasteries. It took hours to go through the temple as it's very large. Our guide explained the stories that were carved into the stone walls of the temple, mostly of battles fought and folklore. One wall was about the sea of milk story of hindu creation.

Much restoration work is in progress, some of the damage was from natural causes such as water, other damage, bullet holes and artillery hits, were obviously man made. The blocks of stone are quite large and heavy so the work must be very difficult as building the place must have been in the 12th century. Holes were drilled into the blocks to insert pieces of wood so that elephants could drag them from the quarry from a quarry 40 km from the northeast. More info on the history and construction can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat

We visited another temple that was used for the filming of tomb raider, had lunch then visited Angkor Thom, the big city. There were once a million people living within the 3 km square area. 

The temple we visited there is called bayon. It was very beautiful with many stone buddha faces all over the building. It was later converted into a hindu temple and many of the buddha images were destroyed or converted to hindu gods. It's interesting that the large faces remained mostly intact.

We took the next morning off and spent lunchtime at the Angkor Museum. The museum was well done and worth a couple of hours to see the all the great art work and displays on the history of the area.