So we were picked up at 5:25 am this morning by a local Cambodian man...our guide...we broke out our busted up cruiser bikes that have to be about 30 years old and started biking toward the wats (wat=temple)...it was dark and kinda creepy...dirt and rock paved roads, locals riding into work on their motorbikes...our goal was to see sunrise over Angkor Wat...the most famous of the over 100 temples here but it was a little too cloudy to see much sun...
The temples are absolutely magnificent. I cannot even begin to comprehend how they were constructed so long ago. Words cannot even begin to express how amazing they are...I think you just will have to explore them yourself someday...
We biked from temple to temple all day on these rickety old bikes...climbed to the top of some of these ancient structures. There are intricite reliefs carved out of stone on almost every wall, buddhist alters with burning incense, trees are even growing through the wats to the point that the stones are beginning to crumble around them...it is absolutely beautiful.
We stopped to buy some fresh fruit along the way...pineapple, banana, mango...had lunch for $4 in an awesome little cafe set alongside the river. Biked all the way back to town (12 hours of biking in total) and all of a sudden there was a clearing of trees and monkeys were everywhere! Fortunately the locals were selling bananas :) There were so many monkeys I honestly couldn't even count them...it was so cool! I tried to feed a banana to one monkey and then all his friends ran over to me and I threw a banana to one of them and then a monkey jumped on my leg so I freaked out (forgot to get my rabies vaccine) and threw them the whole bunch which they qucikly devoured! It was just such an amazing experience to see them right there, literally in the wild...there were little baby monkeys riding on their mother's backs, oh my god, it was just really cool...
We sorta got lost on our way back to town, but we figured it out and made it back to the hotel safely! After I shake out the sand and soot out of my shoes and shower this grimy layer of dirt off myself (it is really dusty and dirty here...especially w/all the bikes/motorbikes/dirt roads)...we're going to hit the night market, drop off our laundry and get to bed early b/c we only have one more day to explore the temples. TOmorrow we're going to hire a tuk tuk (which is a motorbike with a wooden cart on the back) to take us from temple to temple so we can see more and then our next stop is Bangkok Thailand...more soon :)
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