The are many temples in the world. Some big, some small. Some a bit dull, some coated in gold paint to form elaborate places of worship. None, however, compare to that of the Angkor temples in Cambodia. Some of the oldest and largest temples the world has ever seen.

Built around 1000 years ago as the world’s largest city, the area of Angkor holds over 1000 temples from small piles of rubble to the momentous Angkor Wat. The largest religious monument in the world.

That’s the boring facts over. It’s basically a bloody big place in the forest somewhere near Siem Reap, costs about $20 per ticket and holds a truck load of ruins. Ruins that are slowly being restored by the French. Probably fall down soon then.

The first thing we did this morning was visit the travel office in town that sold bus tickets back to Bangkok. We thought a simple bus drive from point a to point b would be a lot easier than having to swap and change transportation numerous times along the way, like we did to get here.

Walking to town we encounter streams of tuk tuk drivers just like in Thailand. They approach you and point to their vehicles shouting out “Tuk Tuk” to get your attention. In Thailand not even a stern no will deter them. Here however they are super nice. They just reply with an “ok sir, thank you”. It’s a shock at first, a nice one.

Being so nice, we decided to jump in one for our trip to the Angkor temples. Apparently you do really need a couple of days or at least one full day, to make the most of the temples. Being the lazy, bed loving travellers we are, we had given ourselves about 4 hours. Oh well.

I suppose it’s difficult to say anything new about a temple. They’re really things you have to actually see to understand. Otherwise you may get something like this.

‘We arrived first at Angkor Wat. The big one. And I tell you what, it’s big. Very big. Huge in fact. And you can really tell it wasn’t built last week.’

You can just look at the pictures instead ay.

It is pretty big though. It was astonishing how a place can remain so totally as it was a millennium ago. Obviously many of the smaller temples have long since eroded away, but you can still see the carvings on the walls and elaborate door ways as if they were built yesterday.

We had about an hour at each of the main temples before our driver would take us to the next one. Although we didn’t see everything and we were a little rushed around Angkor Wat especially, we felt we got to see everything we wanted to and more. Another must see ticked off the list.

On our way back to town we drove past what looked like a miniature circus. We had heard some horrendously large woman with buttered toast hanging from her mouth and a jam smothered chin talking about it that morning. Best thing she has done in the whole of SE Asia apparently. That and a cooking course. Probably on how to use a deep fat fryer. I would like to think there are probably a couple of things better than a mini circus in the whole of SE Asia, but who were we to argue. Suppose it does involve sitting on your arse and eating popcorn. No surprise she liked it…ouch!

Anyway she wasn’t saying it to us. She was talking to another English couple at our hostel, equally revolted by her mouth open when chewing, interrupting others, spit spraying approach to breakfast. God she annoyed me.

Her comments were quite helpful though. We got down there about 2 hours early as we weren’t sure if it would be already sold out. It wasn’t, so we grabbed some food in the circus restaurant area before entering the big top.

1 hour later we were walking back out the show thinking, “My God! That was the best thing in the whole of SE Asia!”.

Well not quite, but it was really good. It was run by some teenagers from a local school just trying to make a better life for themselves. It wasn’t a clown juggling in a mini Cooper with 10 of his mates type circus. It was a more of a performing arts piece with unbelievably talented acrobats. Flipping about like Robin Williams had left them some flubber in his will. It was incredibly good for a bunch of school kids from poor backgrounds. We should have left a tip really. But we’re not made of money. Jeez.

So that was yesterday. Today we are on our way back to Bangkok. 8 hours of pure bus flavoured air con to sit through. Should be a good day.

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