Angkor Day Two: Illness and Tuk-tuks

Our second--and last--full day in Siem Reap and Angkor was December 31st. The next day we were leaving for Lao, and this day we were heading for the most-visited site in the entire world: Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat was something that Corrie had on her must-see list for more than a decade now, and here we were, ready to see it.

Only Corrie was sick as hell, nearly felled by some ind of virus. We were nervous that our entire trip might need to be cut short with a trip to a local hospital, then an early flight home and trip into quarantine. That's really how bad it was--we were planning for the chance of having to skip the rest of the trip. 

The bike ride the day before had either ground down her ability to deal with the sickness or wore her down too much to fight back. In any case, the morning of New Year's Eve was spent discussing possible scenarios and napping.

Eventually we decided to ignore the bikes we'd rented and hire a tuk-tuk for the entire day, like so many other tourists.

Below I've included a scale model of Angkor Wat from the royal palace in Phnom Penh. It shows how big it is, but not the grandeur you feel when you're there:

There is a six-hundred foot moat around the mostly square island that Angkor Wat sits on. Below is a picture of the moat and the entrance wall that is not shown in the closeup of the model above:

Once inside, the walkway is cobbled with large pavers, but if you jump off and walk through the grass, you can catch a glimpse of a rare thing nowadays: a view with few tourists. The Wat sits in the distance looking like the starship from that '80s The Last Starfighter:

As you get closer, the stone detail becomes even more apparent:

Then you get inside and your brain tries to comprehend what's mostly incomprehensible:

Around the back inside the temple is a grassy area, funny, considering this sits many stories above the outside ground level: (Again, notice the lack of tourists (score!))

You can spend hours and still feel like you don;t ave enough time. You could probably spend weeks and always feel that, but eventually, a few hundred photos later you decide to leave.

I took this picture on the way out, before getting all the way back to the moat:

Then we went to the Bayon. The Bayon was a temple or castle in which the king at the time put his own face onto each of the towers, 256 times in all, four on each tower for sixty-four towers. Here's a quick look at just a single face:

He wanted his subjects to know that he was always looking after them. I think the implication is more on the surveillance than extended care, but what can you do. It kept reminding me of that second part of the frst episode of Samurai Jack, when he gets to the future and you get the view of Aku on the umbo-tron eating a sandwich and surveilling his subjects.

This picture, if blown up large enough, showcases the many faces of the Bayon:

From a distance the Bayon truly resembles Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland:

Like the day before, we were weary and cut our day's activities a little bit. Corrie was being a trooper the entire time, which was fantastic. I'm very proud of her ability to soldier on during some of these harder aspects to this adventure.

We made it to the Bauphon near the end of our day (getting started we left the hotel after 1 pm), but were feeling it, me in my left knee and Corrie in general. We decided not to climb the stairs at the Bauphon.

The Bauphon was an early pyramid that was meant to act like a stairway to heaven. It predated Angkor Wat by an era. We thought we could climb the stairs in the back, but were turned down: the only stairs we could take were in the front, and that's when we decided to sip the ascent.

This next picture is a quiet forest stroll next to the south wall of the structure:

Here you can mostly see the general pyramid shape:

We went to dinner on this night, New Year's Eve, in an area of Siem Reap called Pub Town. It was the whitey's side of town, full of pizza joints and overpriced awful lager beers. It was crowded as hell and the ind of place we realized we were happy to have never visited until right then.

That night we ate at a Khmer place that was mad-busy. They screwed up Corrie's meal by forgetting it, but mine, mine...

I ordered this grilled eel and saute peppers and onion dish. The onions and the peppers were nothing special, but that eel...that EEL was probably the best protein dish I may have ever eaten in my short thirty-five-ish years on this planet. That's not hyperbole either. It was unbelievably incredible. Remembering how much everything in Pub Town sucked was the reality, but that eel was out of this world.

We found the only bar in all of Cambodia that served any Irish whiskey besides Jameson and Bushmills, and because we planned on turning in early, skipping the New Year's festivities, and trying to pull a fast one by heading to Angkor Wat for sunrise to welcome the new year and skip the hung-over crowds, we each grabbed a shot of Paddy's and headed back to the hotel for sleep.

At midnight there were explosions that we took for fireworks. They roused us for just moments; we wished each other a Happy New Year and got back to sleep immediately.

We had a dark-time bike ride planned for a few hours later.