Today we got up again at 4:30 to go to Angkor Wat for sunrise, as we drive thru Siem Reap we saw many people stumbling back from pub street. We probably could have gotten up later but we followed the advice of our guide and found ourselves standing around waiting for sunrise. Took a number of pictures of the sunrise but not many turned out.
Then we sat around until 6:30am waiting for Angkor Wat to officially open. The one upside is we were the first couple people to enter Angkor Wat and got some good pictures as we wandered around the largely empty temple.
After Angkor Wat we continued on to see the temples of the Small Circuit. On our way we passed thru Tonle Om Gate, which is a large 12th century gate into Angkor Thom.
Our next stop on the circuit was Bayon Temple. It was a such a large temple it had several recommended walking routes thru it. Jacob also continue is bug hunting thru the temples and found more spiders to show me, which I dodged away from.
We then continued our walk from Bayon Temple over to Bauphon Temple, which had a long bridge way to the temple and a large number of stairs to climb to get to the top for the view.
After our long walk between temples, we met back up with Channa and he told us he was going to a less frequented jungle temple, Ta Nei Temple. This was a cool temple largely because it allowed us to see the difference between the temples being conserved and one that wasn’t, the main difference was the tree overgrowth.
For the last temple of the circuit was Ta Prohm, the temple where the movie Tomb Raider was filmed. There were many large trees that overgrew the temple and looked very cool.
We arrived back at our hotel around noon, took a shower and gathered our laundry to give to the front desk to send out. The we took a nap and made plans for tomorrow since we thought it would take longer to see Angkor Wat than it did. Once the sun went down we set out for dinner at a place that only served spring rolls and had fun again wandering from bar to bar enjoying the night life.
