Hi Gram,
There’s something that I know already, which is that if you’re getting up at 3:15am so you can see a sunrise, pack your bag and have everything ready the night before. Instead of doing what I knew I should do, I just went to bed last night, which is the reason I forgot to pack a plastic bag to sit on while we waited for the sunrise. It’s the reason I’m glad that I had Nattiya to remember the extra battery to charge our phones, remind me to bring my sunglasses, and grabbed the key on our way out the door.

We had remembered, however, to ask the hotel the night before to prepare a brown bag breakfast for us to bring with us. At the front desk, they did not have brown bags for us. They presented us with two wicker baskets, each containing a variety of fruits and breads, neatly packaged in plastic bags and tied with a bow. I’m blown away by the level of service we see here. The bus pulled up a few minutes early, but we were ready and boarded quickly. We were the second to last members to join the group. Do you remember when I mentioned Brian yesterday? He was the last, and required Zac to go in and get him. They returned a few minutes later, Brian showing that he’d woken up as Zac arrived or maybe a few minutes before. With everyone else being ready early though, Brian didn’t put us behind schedule, so no harm or foul.

We presented our tickets again, Nattiya and I giggling at our awful bed pictures, then the bus deposited us a few minutes later. Zac led his little ducklings through the dark, each of us shining our phone flashlights to light our way, down the path and up to the pond in front of the temple. We were the first group there, right at the water’s edge, and each sat on our plastic while we waited for dawn and many more people filled in behind us. I took lots and lots of pictures of the temple in front of us as the sky slowly brightened in the pre-dawn moments while we all just saw in awe as the temple slowly became visible.

Once the sky was sufficiently bright, but still before the sun had risen over the horizon, we all reconvened and headed over to a different vantage point. From our new spot, we had a better angle on the temple as the sun slowly rose and shone between a tower and the rest of the temple. Our tour guide was not only informative, but a budding photographer who told us all about the best angle and trick shots we could get throughout the day. Once we had the picture with the sun shining through, we wrangled Brian again and headed over to one of the main gates to learn more about the history of this massive location. It was kind of cool sitting on the edge of a wall built over 1,000 years ago listening to the history and stories while glancing around at the ruins all around us.

Those ruins came alive for us when Zac guided us over to one of the first outer walls of the main temple building, which had intricate carvings. Well, that sounds pretty basic compared to what we actually saw. The wall was probably 15 ft high and a couple hundred feet long on each side and wrapped all the way around. The whole complex covered something like 1.2 km by 1.4 km, so this wall was probably 600-800 meters on each side. The outer walls were covered in intricate carvings depicting the history, with battles, workers, people smoking from hookahs, drinking, farming, boating… each character was maybe 4-6” high by 4-12” wide, depending on whether it was a person or boat. These were stacked in layers above each other from floor to ceiling and continuing along the whole length of the wall. Many of these carvings had depth and detail that would have taken the artist days to complete each one, and there were more than we could possibly count just in the section of the wall we saw on our tour.

After the wall, we headed inside where we saw a massive purification pool with steps leading down into where the water would have been. We also saw more carvings inside plus statues, stairways, and towers that just overloaded the senses. There were a few spots where monks were actively meditating at the feet of a statue. Visitors were invited to enter these chambers for a closer look, asked to stay silent, remove shoes, and be respectful. Nattiya went in to pray and make an offering, which felt natural as this is her belief system. I felt like I would just be a tourist going through the motions for the dopamine hit rather than actually showing my respects, so I stayed outside and observed.

Past another layer of hallways, we emerged out and saw a towering construct with impossibly steep stairs that had eroded over time. The keepers had built a set of wooden stairs with a minimal handrail to allow tourists to climb up and get an unobstructed view from the top. We climbed up and were awestruck once again with the detail that had been preserved and the grand scale of all of this. After carefully climbing back down the stairs, which are always way scarier on the way down than the way up, everyone regrouped and waited for our tour guide to direct us. Once we finished touring the inside, we all worked our way out a different doorway to the courtyard, then walked around to a gate with more stairs. A short walk later past some monkeys and a pond, we were re-united with our bus and driver.

The next temple has intentionally been left somewhat overgrown to show visitors how these temples looked when they were rediscovered in the 20th century. Pathways and bridges had massive vegetation growing through and across them as we approached. The first sight of a temple building showed a massive tree growing from the top of the building and towering above it all. As we passed through and around that building, we saw a root system crawling down the other side to reach the ground, with steel supports and girders keeping the tree from crushing the man-made structure beneath it. Inside, we saw more of the same or at least similar carvings, columns, and beheaded statues but this time a little more raw and less polished.

One interesting detail was a doorway with carvings of animals, workers, and warriors etched into columns on either side. Interestingly, one of the animals looked exactly like a triceratops, a beast that would have been impossible for the artists in the 10th century to have observed. We worked our way out the other end of that temple, where we waited for Brian and a couple of other stragglers before mounting the bus and heading onto our next destination.

This final stop was the city of Angkor with a differently shaped temple in the center. As we approached the city, we saw that there were four faces of Buddha carved, one into each side, of the main gate. This gate was built into a high wall, akin to the great wall of China, that extended for quite a distance in either direction, with another gate every 3km. The top of the wall was wide enough to allow troop movement and guarding the city and now has a path where pedestrians and bicyclists can ride and enjoy the view from above. We climbed up onto this wall to get a closer view of the Buddha faces and structure guarding the city.

Once we were done with the wall, we climbed back on the bus and continued to our final temple for the day. This one had a different shape and something like a hundred different smiling Buddha faces spread throughout the structure, each with a different smile. When we walked up, we witnessed the massive undertaking of restoring this Goliath. Stones, some 2-3 ft on a side, were numbered and stacked in neat piles outside of the main temple wall seemingly catalogued and documented waiting to be reassembled to make the temple closer to whole again. This temple also had a wall of intricate carvings, many layers high and designed to tell a story, that wrapped around the building. Zac tried telling us some of the story that was told but I was honestly over the whole temples thing at this point. Between the lack of sleep last night so I could be awake for the sunrise this morning, the sun beating down on us as we hunted for shade, and the overload of information and history, my brain just didn’t want to take in anymore knowledge. Sensing that we were all pretty well spent, Zac wrapped up the tour and guided us back to the bus. Vendors tried hawking their wares as we approached the bus, and one guy broke through. That was the ice cream guy, and I wouldn’t doubt if he sold an ice cream stick to every passenger on that bus. I know Nattiya and I each got one and it looked like all of our neighbors were happily enjoying theirs as the bus headed back to town to take us all home.

Back at the hotel, we showered and relaxed a little, then headed into town for one last dinner before we flew out. Mr Kim wasn’t available, so we got Mr Phreak who deposited us at one end of the night market and promised to pick us up a couple hours later. We wandered around a bit, tired but fascinated, before settling on an Indian restaurant, a little hole in the wall place. The story on the menus outlined how the proprietors had circled the globe eight times in their travels over the course of a few years, met many dignitaries and officials, then settled in Siem Reap with the restaurant to bring in income and a charity to spread their message of peace. It was a nice back story to delicious food that we both gobbled down with delight. We were a little early for our pickup, so we wandered up and down the street a little before Mr Phreak spotted us and flagged us down. A short ride later, we tipped and thanked him, then headed to the room to pack a little and get some sleep.