Holiday Part One: Angkor Wat

(See photos of our trip in our Photo Album on the left)

Alyssa: Our holiday began in Cambodia where we were drawn to the lost city of Angkor. Just to provide a bit of background history, the temples of Angkor (in which Angkor Wat was one of the temples) was built during the Khmer and Angkor empires in the 9th to 14th century (note that Europe was still struggling out of the Dark Ages during this time). After the defeat of the Khmer kingdom by the Thais in the 15th century, the sacred temple city was abandoned and its glorious past was forgotten by the people. The temple was discovered by French missionaries in 1860, however, due to the country's intense internal wars during the last 50 years, the lost city of Angkor was isolated from the rest of the world until very recently when Cambodia finally achieved political stability.

Stepping inside some of the Angkor temples was a surreal experience. We were overwhelmed by the temples' huge magnificent structure and in awe of its grandeur. The only slight downside to this experience was the hordes of German, Korean and Japanese tour groups. However, we were lucky to have our own tour guide and driver to bring the experience back to our own desired pace. All in all we visited about 6 of the most popular temples, our favourite being Ta Phrom - the temple dominated by overgrown jungle trees and which also provided the set from where Tomb Raider 2 was filmed.

Our trip to Cambodia turned out better than we had expected. The people there were really nice and friendly and we did not get hassled once (which you would expect in a developing country). We were particularly amused and impressed with the Cambodian children's wit and how tenacious they were in trying to sell to us tourisy post cards and souvenirs. When they couldn't push through a sale with us, they would try a different tact and asked us: "where are you from?" When I replied that I was from Australia, they would smile at me and respond: "Australia, capital city is Canberra, population 20 million people. Do you have any spare Australian currency you could give?" Quite impressive considering their English were learnt purely from interacting with tourists.

We left Cambodia after 3 days of intense sightseeing (and a lot of Kodak moments!) for the change of pace of Thailand...