The most famous temple in Siem Reap is Angkor Wat. It’s on the Cambodian national flag and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. We went early to see the sunrise and that was certainly cool, but if you can handle the heat, no need to get up at 4 am because it’s pretty great at any hour. We visited three other temples around Angkor Wat and I’ll label them as I post the pictures. Most were built around mid-late 12th to early 13th century CE by kings that wanted to show their power. Angkor Wat was originally a Hindu temple to Vishnu, but is now a Buddhist temple.

Angkor Wat

It wasn’t super crowded actually–our guide said that in the high season there are five times as many more people waiting to watch the sunrise.

Here are some pictures of the art on/in the temple–a cool frieze with the king riding off to war (check out the shade umbrella!), one of the ubiquitous, stylish apsaras (kind of like a dancing nymph as far as I can tell), and a Naga Buddha. The Naga is the many headed snake that is protecting the Buddha as he meditates.

Bayon Temple

This one was really cool because if you look closely you can see it has the faces of the Buddha on each tower.

It also has scenes of 12th century Khmer (Cambodian) daily life on it. Below you can see someone giving birth surrounded by midwives, some market haggling, a board game sesh, and some fish getting caught by a crocodile and bird.

Ta Prohm

This temple was in Tomb Raider and is also called the “Jungle Temple”. Here there are spung trees devouring the temple. They are frighteningly alien and just enormous–some are more than 300 years old! The blackish blobs hanging down from the branches of the tree in the second to last picture are huge beehives.

Banteay Kdei

The last temple also has the Buddha face above the entrance. I love how the Cambodian Buddhas smile like they know a really good secret.

We had started our temple tours at 4:45 am so we were done by noon. We spent some time resting and then traveled to do a short tour of APOPO, a place where they train African giant pouched rats to find landmines. The rats are apparently very good at this and are light enough they don’t set off the mines. It was fascinating and we got to hold a rat whom I believe was named Glen. They are “pouched” because they can hold a lot of food in their cheek pouches–apparently two bananas can fit in them! The bananas we have seen here are a smaller, but that still seems like a lot of banana to me.

The next day we took a cooking class. We were assuming that there would be other travelers in the class, but it’s the start of the slow season now, so we were the sole guests.

Beforehand we went to the local market. The market was a crazy contrast to the calm, air-conditioned grocery store that we went to the night before–it was loud, hot, and labyrinthine with many vendors and items. And no fixed prices, of course, which always makes us anxious and confused. There are a lot of fruits and vegetables that I have never seen in the markets here; I really love all the variety of mushrooms they have. The last picture is of some kind of mushroom.

For our meal, we made mango salad–a new favorite of mine, I think I’ve eaten it everyday for the last three days–a tofu and mushroom fry-up, and a coconut cream banana dessert. The banana confection was heavenly–surprisingly it had mung beans in it!

At night we went to Phare, the Cambodian Circus. Phare trains disadvantaged Cambodian youth in different art forms, including really fun circus skills. It was loud, chaotic, and delightful–the performers did amazing things! Somehow the performance was supposed to be showcasing the difficulties of being young in Cambodia, but I’m not sure whether that got across. It’s hard to have a joyful Circus performance with that sort of lesson, I think.

The people here are wonderfully friendly and kind, but one message that you get from the local people is that it’s hard being Cambodian so please, please give us money. The Circus was super cool, but kind of expensive and they still brought out the donation boxes at the end. When we didn’t do a Trip Advisor review for our Angkor Wat tour the day of, the guide texted us and said it was essential we do so for the sake of their children. We’ve been asked for reviews about our experiences before they happened.  Many in Siem Reap are living in poverty and most everyone is reliant on tourism. And the wealth disparity between the tourists and the local people is dramatic. It’s hard to justify buying the $18 bottles of wine being sold at our hotel when the average salary of a Cambodian is $500 per month. I’ve known this for a long time, of course, but it can be easy to forget that travel can be really emotionally uncomfortable sometimes.

We’ve had a fun and interesting time in Cambodia and now we’re off to our last stop, Bangkok!