Which Wat? What Wat? That Wat!

Do you like what I did with the title there, Ells doesn’t seem to think it’s as funny as I do!

Anyway…..sorry, where was I, YES. We have arrived in Cambodia after a long day traveling. We got up at 4:30 to pack and catch the train from Bangkok to the Cambodian border. It was quite amusing seeing the very worse for wear drunks stumbling around the Khoa San road as we were leaving.

The Cambodian border has a reputation for taking an extremely long time to get through, however with a small “extra fee” paid at the right time we were through in 5 minutes just leaving 3.5 hours of moonscape style roads before we got to Siem Riep.

So we did WAT (sorry last time I promise!) every tourist does when they come here and we visited the world famous Wats at Angkor. They were absolutely amazing as you can see from the picture above. There are over 20 separate Wats that were built several hundreds of years ago by the ruling royal family of the time. They were all pretty spectacular but some of them were just downright dangerous - including the one in this picture! These steps are ridiculously steep - very funny to watch some tourists climb up and then see the panic on their faces when they realised they had to come back down! They have been used as the back drop to loads of films, the most recent being Tomb raider. However it was difficult to image the serenity that must have been present at these temples when surrounded by an army of Japanese and Korean tourists. I have never really seen the stereo typical Japanese tourist with 10 cameras and a disregard for anyone else around, but there were thousands of them here! We did manage to find a temple that was totally deserted and it was beautiful to sit and just relax (so much so that Ellie fell asleep!)

After a pretty hectic day battling the crowns we decided to have a more relaxed experience and went to the flooded forest (tried to think of something more spectacular to call it but that is pretty much it). This would have been relaxing but for the fact that at the end of our tuk tuk ride we had to ride 30 minutes on the back of scooters over what can only be described as a MOTO X track. Also being heavier than Ells and the average Cambodian my bike kept getting stuck in the deep sand and I had to push it out.

Anyway back to this river forest thing, there is a river delta that floods by over 20 feet during the wet season cutting off several villages (all of which are either floating or on stilts) and consumes an entire forest. As the waters recede you can go on a dug out canoe through the forest. It was really weird to be floating past trees in the middle of the forest. The other strange thing was the fact that the village was no longer under water so all of the houses were 20 feet above the ground!

Oh the other amusing thing I saw on the way was what I can only describe as pig carriers. These guys on Mopeds tie up fully grown pigs in this wooden holder and put them on the back of their bikes to take them home. I had to double take as we went past one and this pig snout shot out and started oinking at me!