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Angkor Wat [for real]:
I woke up very early to get there for sunrise. I had arranged to meet the tuktuk driver who took me to the hotel at 5am, he was early and I was a few minutes late but he seemed not to mind. I suggested a price of $15 for the day would be reasonable and he agreed and we set off. It took about half an hour to get to Angkor Wat, the first stop. The sun was just starting to rise and I went a bit crazy with the photos. All the other tourists had opted to sit on small plastic chairs to watch the sun rise fully but I saw most of it as I was walking towards the Wat, down the HUGE granite walkway from the moat all the way up to the front door. I was the 4th [or so] person inside the actual temple so I basically had it to myself. I was a little faster than everyone else so I soon overtook and was all alone. A guard offered to take me 'up' through the no entry sign, for a small fee of $10, to watch the sunrise. I decided not to because the sun had risen by then and I didn't want to spend the money. It was about that time that my camera announced after 2 month that the memory was full. I deleted a few crappy photos quickly and just took a few sparingly for the final section of the Wat.

I have to say that I was very impressed by Angkor Wat, people said it was big but had poor carvings and this and that but I thought they were pretty impressive and it's size was astonishing!

Before I go on I will warn you that I don't know the names for most of the temples I visited.

On the way to the next place [The walled city] I went through my camera deleting all the bad shots to try and squeeze in as many photos of the rest of the complex as I could. I managed to make enough space for the whole day which was good.

The second stop was the North Library of Bayon, the most amazing building I visited. It looked like it shouldn't be standing up, it was just so cool and too hard to describe. Unfortunatly I was so worried about my memory I only took one photo of it which does it no justice what so ever. It was part of the walled city complex [name something to do with Thom] and next I walked to the giant Budda. The lady there gave me some incense and I waved it in front of the Budda for luck. You always wave 3 sticks of incense, one for you, one for god and one for the Budda [I think]. Then I found out that [of course] this 'luck' came at a price of 1 dollar, luckily I didn't have any small money apart from 300 Riel [approx 3p] so it wasn't such a great cost. Finally I walked to another temple that is under renovation because its sand walls have collapsed the whole structure numerous times and the Frech government has finally decided to renovate it properly so it doesn't fall down again. It was just a building site so I couldn't actually go in. I just read signs about the work being done.

Then we drove to some small temples. One had been renovated by the French and the other by the Chinese. The French had tried to make it like before but the Chinese had opted to give the temple a Chinese theme which was amusing.

Next up was the one I had really been looking forward to, 'The Tomb Raider One', apparently it was the setting for the Tomb Raider movie. The fasinating thing about this temples was not that it was mostly collapsed but there were actually giant trees growing out of the walls and on top of the temple itself. It was a huge structure and like a maze inside with all the collapsed roofs. Very cool but still didn't beat the library!

The last stop was a kind of reddy temple which was heavily barrred to stop peices falling off. It was large another one of my favorites. Across the road was a big lake which only the immediate royal family is allowed to swim in, noone else. I don't know how often they take a dip but I imagine the water is very clean.

By the time we returned to Siem Reap it was only 12:30 so I had some lunch and paid the tuktuk driver $8 more to take me to the Solous group. It is 3 very very old temples, hundreds of years older than Angkor Wat and the others! They were made ina very different way, from very small red bricks. They were all falling down and in bad shape but they had incredible details and there was noone there. I really liked these 3.

Not much happened for the other day in Siem Reap before I caught the bus to Bangkok and my flight to HK...