Wander with Mi: Thailand Day 10/Cambodia Day 3

This day @.@ It was a GREAT day. But reeeeeally exhausting.

We did the sunrise at Angkor Wat thing.

I can’t remember if I mentioned, but I let E plan this leg of the trip because this whole trip was a little last minute (more so than I’m used to planning anyway) and I was overwhelmed with some other life things. Anyway, the point being, I knew NOTHING about Cambodia when we went, or the places we’d be going.

So yes, I didn’t really know what was involved.

Apparently Sunrise At Angkor Wat is a bit Thing To Do.

So we arranged with the front desk and up we got at 4 and met our driver for the day. It took 45-60 minutes to get there, E went right back to sleep but I couldn’t. Tuktuks aren’t the most comfortable for sleeping in.

We got there and it was pitch black, and we had noooo idea where we were going. A flashlight would have been really useful, but… we didn’t think of that (and of course, I had one back at the hotel). We managed though! I’m surprised we didn’t trip and die. Then as we were more into the complex we were just looking around, totally unsure where we were supposed to *go* for this sunrise view. We didn’t even know which way to face!

But we saw some lights and joined a small gathering of 5 or so people at the edge of a small lake and thought “Welp, I hope this is the right spot!”

Thankfully, it was!

I wasn’t sure how it would go so I just kept snapping photos, there’s more of a progression in my flickr album.

But I won’t post all those 8D

I think this is the best one I got though.

Looks so peaceful right?

We were definitely in the right spot!

By the time we left there was easily 150-200 people there.

Sadly some of the people were quite rude and pushy. But some were very nice! And a nice one took this for us.

Shortly after that picture we decided it didn’t look like the sky was going to change much more, so we went to explore the temple.

Morning prayers.

This was an interesting temple in that it was fairly plain, as far as these things go, but then there’d be some crazy carvings.

It was huge, possibly the largest one we went to.

I really liked these carvings.

This counts as “fairly plain,” when compared to that first one we went to!

We walked all the way around the outside.

This bit is in the center, inside the courtyard type thing.

Which you can see a little better here.

Up at the top, after many many stairs (it doesn’t look bad here, but it looked really bad in person) there was some sort of special temple thing. It wasn’t open yet, but the guards let us know that if we bribed them we could go up early. We felt there was plenty to see without it. Plus actually we didn’t have enough USD on us even if we’d wanted to. So we planned to come back later, as our temple tour was a huge loop (that didn’t end up happening btw). It opened at 8 and we left there at 7, so we didn’t want to just wait for an hour.