Second Day in Siem Reap...

Saturday, 22 December 2007

Our second day started out with a 4:40 AM wakeup call (it was supposed to be for 4:00 AM so that we would be ready to leave for 5:00). When Charles asked at the front desk why they didn't wake us at 4 they looked at him like he was from Mars and said, "you'll still make it for sunrise"...ok, whatever...this is Siem Reap time, not L.A....so we took an air con car out to Sra Srang, a "pool of ablutions" (a platform area overlooking a huge reservoir of sorts which the Lonely Planet guidebook swore would be the best place to catch the sunrise -- to avoid other tourists!) unfortunately quite a few other tourists were planning the exact same thing and we joined 20 of them (mostly Japanese -- seems to be a few HUGE tour groups of them in this town) and a whole community of natives who surrounded us and tried to hawk their wares. Cute little urchins but they got on our nerves after awhile. Needed coffee -- that they were happy to provide. Amazing sunrise shots which Laura captured on digital still and I did on mini-DV and some Super-8 time lapse!

We got the drop on the rest of the chumps by heading straight over to Ta Prohm -- this is the temple that has the famous tree you've all seen postcards and photos of. Needless to say this was truly amazing...the best part being that we had the place to ourselves! Only one small Japanese tour group was ahead of us but no one really showed up until we finally left. Got some great photos in the early morning light. Unfortunately we've been having some troubles uploading photos on these dodgy guest house computers... even though they are on a network or dsl it takes forever to upload. Maybe the fact that the pix are all over 2 mb has something to do with it....alas, there is no Photoshop or other image editing program on these pcs so I can't change the resolution... [ed. note - finally adding more on 3/6/08!]

Another odd aspect to this temple was the unexpected (and somewhat unwelcome) "tour guide/police officer" who decided to act as impromptu guide. We had already fended off one such chap but since this guy looked official I (unwisely) assumed he was just going to show us a few things (like the site where they filmed one of the "Tomb Raider" movies). Not so...
he did show us a lot of interesting bits and if half his history of this place was correct then I guess it was worth the few bucks we paid him at the end...

Wrapped things up with a final car trip to Angkor Thom's Bayon. Another spectacular site but this time we were there in prime turista time -- a ton of folks including the huge Japanese tour groups. Again, my attempts at getting people to leave so Laura and I could enjoy this place alone did not receive receptive ears. Can't understand why. We did meet some interesting folks including one Australian-sounding chap who claimed to be from New York and was on a 3-month SE Asian trip with his wife and two young children. Must be nice...