Angkors Away!

We're going way out of order here! We have things to tell you about our Chinese New Year, but those pictures are in Shanghai. If you'll bear with me, I'll start with some Siem Reap while we're still here and then pause for some New Year-ing when we get back to school and its picture server.

So! Let's start about 5:30 pm before our 11:35 pm flight to Siem Reap: we start getting texts from our friends going to Cambodia and Vietnam that they're stuck on the runway in Shanghai due to congested air traffic. That has to be a load of baloney since you couldn't even see across the street due to the "haze." Brian and Anja going to Vietnam finally made it out three hours late (and super hungry). Our friend Suzanne sat in the plane for hours, missing her connection in South Korea, before finally getting her flight cancelled. :(   With some nervousness, we make it to the airport and cross our fingers.

Success! We only left 15 minutes late, and we got to enjoy an obscene amount of legroom in our exit row. No joke.


There's still a good foot of space beyond the reach of my toes.
Woohoo!

Getting ready for a nap, we cozy up only to get dinner served. I would say a midnight snack, but there was entree, salad, roll, and dessert. Weird.

We landed about 3:30 am and grabbed a tuk-tuk to our hotel where we were granted use of our room eight hours before check-in. Yay! After a lovely nap until 8 am and a nice breakfast at the hotel restaurant, we were ready to start exploring.


A map for your reference.

I'm not sure why we thought it would be short day, but we rented cruisers ($1.50 each) for the day and biked out to the temples.



Six kilometers later, we were standing in front of Angkor Wat.



We also found someone monkeying around...




The Angkor Wat complex is actually not the biggest, but the actual temple of Angkor Wat is the biggest religious structure. There are other smaller structures in the complex that you can go climbing through.



While you can get close to the top of Angkor Wat, there was a gigantic line to get in so we thought to save that for another day.



So off we biked to and through Angkor Thom...



finding this cool one called Baphuon ("Bah-fawn").


This one had the problem of being completely dismantled so that they could restore it. Political turmoil occurred, and they lost the diagram of where each stone went. The little area is covered in stones that they are slowly putting back together.



I couldn't go in and up since my shorts showed above my knees (floozy!), so I sent Mark in with the camera.



Back on the bikes, we go through the north gate of Angkor Thom and enter Preah Khan from the west.
















Cambodian sized!





It was my favorite one because there were so few people. Another hop on the bike to see Neak Pean... (nothing to see... I'd ignore the guide book and skip it.)



Stop at Ta Som...



And we biked back.

For those keeping track, we biked 23 miles.