Bin it! sign outside our hotel
Peter & Ruth, Grand Palace
Painting stencils on the ceiling, Grand Palace
Guardian beast statues, Grand Palace
Guard & Thai Tourist
Temple inside National Museum
At the end of the day we flew Sat. evening to Siem Reap, the town nearest Angkor Wat. Our tuktuk driver (motorcycle pulling a 4 person cart) picked us up at 8:00 and we spent all day walking around the ancient temples and palaces of Angkor Wat. It's hard to describe the scale of the place: each temple goes on and on, with corridors, courtyards, more and more carvings and statues. It's a long drive between temples and there are lakes and restaurants and thousands of people, both tourists and workers. There seem to be at least a hundred women sweeping leaves into heaps in the jungle beside the road. I especially liked the twisty, drapy roots strangling the stones of the temple Ta Prohm and the large smiling Easter Island type faces of Bayon temple.
Relief: Riding Elephant into battle
Bas Relief Crocodile eating a fish
Smiling Faces
Folk group playing on the trail to one of the temples
Tree roots strangling temple
Peter & Ruth
Twisty Tree Roots
Tuktuk driver sleeping in his hammock
By the time our tuktuk driver returned us to our hotel in the late afternoon, we were footsore and tired, so we've spent the rest of the day reading, swimming in the hotel pool, and eating Indian food. One more day here and then we fly to Laos tomorrow. It's been fun and relaxing to travel with Peter & Ruth. They've taken care of all the logistics, and they speak both Lao and Thai, so we can just sit back and enjoy. We're certainly in a very different climate, culture, and landscape than New Zealand.
View out balcony window, Siem Reap
No comments:
Post a Comment