In Siem Reap, the main attraction is a UNESCO world heritage site - the Angkor Archaeological Park, a complex of lots of different temples covering an area of 400km2, containing remains of the different capitals of the Khmer Empire, from the 9th to the 15th century. The most famous is the temple of Angkor Wat. The apparent big thing to do for this is get up stupid early and watch the sunrise over it. As there's so much to see and we have a week here, we got a 3 day pass to see everything (options were 1 day, 3 day and 7 days).

When looking at the weather forecast, we thought going for a sunrise later on in the week would be the best way to play it, as it was pretty much guaranteed to rain (spoiler alert, it was glorious sun for the entire day). So we did some of the other temples, saving the crowning glory for last later in the week. So it was a slightly early morning, we were meeting our Tuk Tuk driver, Mr Ten, at 8am to head to the complex. So the morning was pretty much wake up, get ready, eat breakfast, drink coffee, drink coffee, drink coffee then head out.

The first stop was in fact the ticket office, located just outside the complex, which might be the most impressive ticket office I've ever seen.

I mean if that's the ticket office, the actual place must be awesome. 

But the people in Siem Reap, I think are very shrewd, most of the building is selling gifts and what-not, knowing tourists want most of this stuff. They even had a top 20 souvenirs to buy (I love number 1).

---Before we get into it, I will say we (Hannah) took a lot of photos while we were there - they start here if you want to flick through all of them, I'm only going to insert a few below (seriously, a lot, only about one fifth of what was taken are in this album...) https://russ-and-mead.travelmap.net/photos/siem-reap?index=43 anyway on we go ---

But after a reasonably painless ticket purchasing process, we were off to see our first Temple, Preah Khan. The route there did however take us through some of the other temples we would see on other days, so we concentrated on not seeing stuff pretty much the entire journey. 

The first thing that really took us was the sheer scale of the place, it is massive. Second was just how it was even constructed. The intricacy of designs is incredible. Needless to say we spent a while exploring the nooks and crannies here. We also liked the fact that, apart from areas which were realllly unsafe, we could walk about anywhere in the temple. None of this health and safety stuff. And if you wanted to pick up a little piece for a souvenir, that's (probably) totally cool as well.

*we unfortunately didn't manage to capture any of the India Jones diving rolls or face-melty action.

The second building was called Neak Poan, a temple constructed in the middle of an artificial island, with pools on each compass point. It used to be an important pilgrimage point for Buddhists, who believe you could remove your sins by bathing in the various pools. Unfortunately, with the ever increasing heat, a lot of these pools are dried up now, really more of a bathing puddle...

*picture of very sacred construction materials.

Third was Ta Som, a small temple which the King dedicated to either his father or teacher. 

Next up was the East Mebon temple, which used to be at the centre of a reservoir (also dried up), dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva who must have really liked elephants (there were a lot of statues).

The final stop of the day was Pre Rup, a temple mountain which you can walk up to get great views of the surrounding forest area. They think this may have been an important site for funeral traditions, as they have a pit at the entrance to the temple, which was used to rotate the corpse during cremation to face certain points i.e. a human spit roast (not that kind).

On the way there we saw many of the classic examples of Cambodia safety, including the standard baby motorbike restraint in action (yes there was another child sat between the driver and the mother, the standard family of 4 on 1 bike):

After all this templing we were pretty knackered (and so hot), so it was time for a late lunch:

Then nap, swim, read, dinner. Easy.