SEA Tour 05: Cambodia overland from HCMC, Vietnam

We've been on the road for five days now.

By now, I'm getting used to understanding broken English, (I am hoping I wont get used to talking in broken English either); to using different currencies as Leah would say, "play money" and to unpacking and packing my things wherein somewhere in the middle of packing you realize you have no room.

14 hours overland to Cambodia, and I am dead tired. Turn of luck, we ended up boarding the VIP bus! with no additional charge! yey. more leg room for us. I was asleep the whole trip until we're at the border. This is our first overland border crossing, and with the stories we heard regarding Immigration, it was a surprise that we never left our bus and never met any immigration officer. What happened basically was, our bus conductor collected our passports and a processing fee. We waited for a bit and one immigration officer went inside the bus maybe, i guess, to check or something. and that's it! we didn't even changed our bus. You see, the bus we rode on from Vietnam will not be acknowledge once it crossed the Vietnam-Cambodia border so we have to get on a bus registered in Cambodia. But in our case, there were none of those nonsense..so cool. what a luck.

On board the bus, Leah mentioned she heard someone speaking Tagalog. I told her to sleep it off, she might have heard Spanish or the sort. But when I was the one awake, there it is. Someone IS speaking Tagalog. Being on the road for almost a week now, we were both so excited to meet a kababayan and for me, to talk to someone in Tagalog other than Leah. We were plotting how to introduce ourselves until one of the two Pinays got up from her seat and started to talk to someone on the phone with this annoying conyo English. crap. well, you can easily guess what we did next...rather, what we didn't do next..

We had a brief stopover at Phnom Penh and arrived at Siem Reap around 9 in the evening. Our tuktuk driver which we later will be known as Ani, have been waiting for three hours. Indeed, patience is a virtue.

We just dropped our bags and headed to the night market for our late dinner. We got in early because we need to wake up at 4am to watch the sunrise at angkor wat.

And men, we didn't realize how tired we were until we were on our back. Never mind we were on the road for almost half of a day, we were simply tired and didn't mind sleeping with dirty clothes. We woke up just in time for Ani to pick us up. It was still dark at the temple but there were already alot of people all eager to see the magnificent angkor wat sunrise.

..men, do they have reason to wait for that sunrise..

Breakfast was served back at the guesthouse and we just came back to the temples for the guided tour. We weren't into tour guides, really. We just decided to have one because we haven't researched about the temples. And I don't want either to just look at blocks and blocks of stones with carvings

Apsara refers to the graceful, joyful female dancers whose images can be found on the temples at Angkor and elsewhere. In Hindu mythology, apsarases were female nymphs who danced for the gods

One of the three gods of Hindu Trinity (Trimurti). Can't remember which one. But there were Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver and Shiva, the destroyer.

Man made pond surrounding the temple. A strategic construction of the temple.

..Unlike other temples at Angkor, Ta Prohm has been left as it was found, preserved as an example of what a tropical forest will do to an architectural monument when the protective hands of humans are withdrawn..

Bayon Temple or Smiling Temple known for its smiling Buddha faces

Bullets

Lotus flower, a symbol commonly seen both in Hinduism and Buddhism.

"..the heart of the beings is like an unopened lotus: when the virtues of the Buddha develop therein, the lotus blossoms; that is why the Buddha sits on a lotus bloom."

the very steep stairways represent the difficulty of ascending to the kingdom of the gods

Sunset at Phnom Bakheng

According to Wikipedia Angkor Wat is described as the best-preserved temple at the site, it is the only one to have remained a significant religious centre since its foundation — first Hindu, dedicated to the god Vishnu, then Buddhist. It is the world's largest religious building.

I will not bore you with all the history shits.. some interesting facts..

...The modern name, Angkor Wat, means "City Temple"; Angkor is a vernacular form of the word nokor which comes from the Sanskrit word नगर nagara meaning capital or city. Wat is the Khmer word for temple...

....other early Western visitors, found it difficult to believe that the Khmers could have built the temple, and mistakenly dated it to around the same era as Rome....

...Using computer simulations it has been shown that the ground plan of the Angkor complex mirrors the stars. It appears that its purpose was to architecturally mirror the heavens in order to assist in the harmonization of the earth and the stars...

By night time, our legs hurt badly for too much walking and climbing throughout the temples, even dinner was a heavy task for us. But we still went through our last night in Cambodia. We had dinner with Ani, our tuktuk driver for the entire day.

Angelina Jolie frequented this bar during her Lara Croft days. They even named a drink after her.

half dollar beer...

...best way to cap the night.

You see, Cambodia is a struggling country. If you read a brief history about the country, wars and rebellion were the main causes of their current situation. I was under the impression that whatever problems we have back home, one way or another, they're similar to the problems of our neighboring countries. They don't differ.

Next, temple overload in Bangkok...