We woke up to a knock at our door… oh
crap! Our alarm didn’t go off, or if it did it certainly didn’t wake us up. So
we had Cara and Emily banging on our door just gone 5am. The reason we were up
so early was to go and watch the sunrise at Angkor Wat temple.
Angkor Wat is the world’s largest
religious building. There are three main temples, the other two are Bayon and
Ta Prohm. Unfortunately the weather was quite cloudy so the sunrise was very
disappointing. I don’t know whether it was that or that this building just
looks more impressive in photos than in real life, but I wasn’t that amazed by
it.
We walked around the grounds for a bit before making our way back to our
driver. We hired a tuk tuk for the day, which is needed as these temples are
quite far apart from each other. Next stop was the Bayon temple. There are 216
faces of Avalokiteshvara watching you as you walk around; wooden stairs have
been added, as like all of the temples we saw this day, because although there
are always restoration works happening, these temples are falling apart/eroding
day by day. Bayon was my favourite one of the day because there were a lot of
carvings on the walls and I felt this temple had more of a story than the other
two.
Last stop of the day was at Ta Prohm,
the most famous among tourists because it was used in the Tomb Raider and Indiana
Jones’ Two Brothers movies. It was built in the 12th century and has
mostly been left as ruins instead of restoring it.
It was about 11am (even if it did feel
about 4pm!) and we were templed out! We got back to the hostel, had a quick nap,
grabbed some lunch and didn’t do a lot for the afternoon. We went out for
dinner around 6pm and looked in the night markets along the way, probably one
of the best markets we’ve been to so far and I didn’t even buy anything!
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