The land tour I booked online was surprisingly exclusive. Little did mum and I expect that we would get a tour guide cum car all to ourselves... It was great though 'cos everything was still quite flexible despite the existence of a pre-planned itinerary for 2 out of 3 days. Tour guide was atypically burly for a Cambodian (most ppl I saw had like smaller built) and was frequently self-amused by things he told us (esp when he thought he told a good joke/ said something witty), breaking into this deep hearty laughter every now and then. That aside, TG was really knowledgeable and spoke good English, which certainly made communication a breeze. In addition to being fluent in English, he was also studying German and Spanish to improve his language capabilities! The many Japanese-fluent tour guides I encountered at Angkor Archaeological Park also put me to shame... :P
This post will be on two key attractions within the Angkor Archaelogical Park (Angkor Wat and other temple/city ruins are all housed within). Due to short stay, I only had one day to tour the park... If you really wanted to explore everything thoroughly, one day is definitely way too short... So this time round it really felt like a "touch and go" kinda tour for me. There were many interesting corners and spots I wanted to linger on at, to just soak in lost-civilisation kind of atmosphere, but perhaps company was not quite right hehe. Also hard to stay on for too long at a place when on guided tour. Though Mum was similarly awed by the structures, she got temple-fatigue by the end of the day, commenting that "after a while, all the temples look the same" :P
Though knowledgeable TG imparted us quite a bit of history and background of various temples, I prob only retained like 30% of what I was told. Hehe so my post will (as usual) focus on the visual aspects of the tour...
As you can see, Ta Prohm temple is famous for its overgrown/ intertwined trees... Apparently many of the temples, when first discovered, were covered by the jungles... Many of them had trees removed during restoration etc, but Ta Prohm was left pretty intact... I'm glad it was, 'cos this place was pretty amazing.
Algae/moss-covered slabs of stone... This temple really possessed this lost civilisation kind of atmosphere...
Beauty in chaos. Dunno how tree can survive with no soil..? But it seems to be thriving pretty well!
Close-up of tree roots in previous picture. Now, according to TG, this entrance was apparently featured in the Tomb Raider movie. Hmmm I can imagine why, cos it's pretty out of this world! Due to its movie fame, there were also like a tonne of tourists posing in front of it :P
A four-faced Buddha tower, with the faces pointing at the four cardinal directions. TG added that they also represented the four divine qualities or something in Buddhism... one of which was 'Charity'. Hehe, as you can tell, my memory not very good....
We also visited the Khmer city Angkor Thom... while walking through the sprawling compounds, I saw a temple near the Man and Woman ponds... In fact while driving through the park, there were several temples tourists could scale, mainly to like see the view from the top... Mum didn't want to scale it so I climbed up on my own... :) BTW, weather was baking, but I still preferred it to rainy weather (luckily it didn't rain v much those few days though it was rainy season in Siem Reap)
Me in some funny cube-like structure at top of temple hehe. Hopped into my ancient picture frame after setting self-timer on camera... :)
The beautiful Bayon temple within Angkor Thom. Famous for its many many four-faced Buddha towers. I think there are like 30 over towers....
Row of gods lining left side of bridge leading to south gate of Angkor Thom. There's like another row of 'devils' on the right...
