Listening: Old man, don't lay so still. You're not yet young. There's time to teach. Point to point. Point observation. Children carry reservations. Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold.
What's my problem? Everything becomes a double edged sword.
Seim Reap is a million times better than Phnom Penh. Really I'm only saying that because the traffic is better, the sights to see are cooler, and I've actually met some people here.
The day after I saw the Royal Palace, the Silver Pagoda, and the National Museum, I took the six hour bus ride to Seim Reap. The Royal Palace was cool and all, but all of the parts that I really wanted to see were closed off from the public.
But I rolled into Seim Reap at around three in the afternoon. I just wanted a tuk-tuk into the city center. It was offered to me for a dollar, but the dude wanted take me to HIS friend's guest house and wanted me to commit to having HIM drive me to the temples the next day. I wasn't having any of that, so when I said, "NO. No tomorrow. No guesthouse. Just to the market and that's it." the price went from a dollar to three. I told them all to piss off and I ended up finding a moto driver that would take me for a buck. It was a rough ride with both my pack, my day pack and being on the back of a motorbike, but I survived.
when I got to the city center, the finding of a guest house wasn't nearly as easy as I thought. There were a lot of places in the fifteen dollar range. Of course, they were nice rooms with aircon and cable TV, maybe even a balcony, but I was shooting a little lower. I'm going to be in Hong Kong next week, and I feel the need to brace myself financially.
I ended up having a tuk-tuk driver take me to a guesthouse. He said free of charge. If I like it, I stay. If not, we go to the next one. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Again, the first place I looked got as low as twelve dollars. I wanted lower. So I finally got an eight dollar room at the Green Town Guesthouse. It has a fan and a TV. Actually it's a triple room, but they're letting me have it to myself for the eight bucks. I could have had a single room for five, but it looked like a cell, had no TV and the bathroom was muggy and smelled of mold. My room is worth the extra three dollars. You think it's just three dollars, but three dollars goes a long way here in Asia if you're smart about it.
Since my tuk-tuk driver was so good, I decided to book him for my temple trips. He took me that evening to get my three day pass to the temples of Ankor Wat, which includes the sunset the evening before the pass starts if you go after five in the afternoon.
I passed by Ankor Wat, just because I wanted to save it for the last day, but I could see its greatness. Instead I went to another temple called Phnom Bakheng. It's a temple on a hill. There's not much to explore, but the view of the sunset is amazing.
****Continued on Day 64****
There were an immense number of people on this temple. People would jockey for the best possible position to take pictures of the sunset.
It just so happened that on that particular afternoon, there was a band of clouds that hovered right at the horizon. So, when the sun came down, it hid behind the clouds for the most part. You could, though, see the light of the sun burn through the clouds making a perfect ruby red circle in the middle of the clouds.
I actually went to bed early that night. It had been an early morning getting the bus at tweny past seven in the morning and spending the day on a bus with seats that were just the right size to make them uncomfortable to sleep in.
The next day, I woke up early to meet my driver (whose name is ACTUALLY Boratt) so that we could get a move on seeing the temples. Again, we bypassed Ankor Wat and headed straight for Ankor Thom.
The temple that I saw for sunset the prior night and the view of Ankor Wat from the street as we drove by gave me no real indication of what I was in for. I knew that it was supposed to be impressive, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer awesomeness that was the temples of Ankor. The first of the temples that I saw in Ankor Thom was Bayon. The sheer magnitude of this place was indescribable. There were huge towers that represented mountains, and at least a hundred faces carved into the building as tall as I am and as wide as my wingspan.
I spent a good three or four hours walking around the greater Ankor Thom area, which included other temples, the Terrace of Elephants, which was a sort of raised grassy area where royalty and special guests would watch parades and special events from, as well as the Terrace of the Leper King, which was kind of the same, but had a trench around the terrace that had walls that were covered in intricate carvings.
I spent a solid ten hours exploring different temples and royal palaces that date back to the 11th century. By the time it hit half four, it was time to go see sunset. Since I had seen it at Phnom Bakheng the night before, I wanted to see it somewhere different.
That's when my driver told me that the only two places to see sunset were Phnom Bakheng and Ankor Wat. So, I sucked it up and went to Ankor Wat. I didn't explore much at all when I was there. I was still saving it. Well, sort of. I'll get to that later.
When I got as far back in Ankor Wat as I could, there still wasn't a great place to see the sunset. And then, to top it all off, the workers at the temple started kicking people out. I asked the guard why we were being kicked out, and he said that the only place to catch sunset was at Phnom Bakheng. Oh well. So, before the sun really set, I caught my tuk-tuk driver and headed back to the hotel.
That night I ended up having dinner with some of the people that I met at my guest house the evening before. We had a good time kicking back with some good food and then a few beers afterwards. I think that the gem of the night for me was that I had the most amazing yellow lemon and kaifir lime leaf sorbet. It was the best sorbet that I have ever had in my entire life. My. entire. life.
Today, I woke up early to catch sunrise at Ankor Wat. See, I heard that you have to go every day until you get a good one. This one was lackluster, but it was so early that I've decided that it was good enough. I ran into some guys that I had met in Halong Bay in today's temples. I also saw the Landmine Museum which was pretty cool.
Since I was up so early, I packed it in at two and have spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing around the guesthouse. Tomorrow, I'm starting at half nine and I'll be going straight on through sunset.
Being on these temples make me think a lot about what it means to see the world. I have been to Disney's Animal Kingdom and I've seen how they try to emulate things, carvings and so on and so forth. But once you see the real thing in person, you realize how hollow it can be. It's a distilled, sterilized version of the real thing in 1/100th scale. I wish everyone could be atop some of these temples. I wish that everyone could walk through the maze of rooms and hallways to see the bas-relief carvings. And, I wish that these ruins could last forever, but I know that they're rapidly crumbling despite UNESCO's best efforts. I can't wait to get back to the States so I can upload my pictures. There will be some big picture payoffs once that happens.
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