Happy 4th of July! Marc and I are now in Siem Reap, and had a very full day yesterday. We arrived around midnight Sat PM/Sun AM, slept for a few hours and was up and about by 6:30am! Strangely I've had a much easier time getting up early while on vacation than in the States -- probably because I'm often in bed by 10pm here, exhausted from each day's adventure.

Yesterday once we had breakfast (included in our $15/night AC room + free laundry + free bike use + free fishies eating our feet calluses), we got on bikes and proceeded to bike the 10km or so to Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, etc. This turned out to be a great way to see the sights in this vast ancient city of Angkor. We covered a fair amount of ground, starting at Angkor Wat around 8am. It was already crawling with loud obnoxious Chinese and Japanese tourists by then, so we did our best to try to avoid them. Angkor Wat is truly quite remarkable with some really elaborate and very large carvings (bas-relief) all around the exterior walls that tells stories of various mythical battles. I had gotten a small guidebook that proved to be really quite detailed in explaining each of those bas-reliefs, and so there was no need for a guide. The center of Angkor Wat itself goes up 3 tiers, and one has to scale some pretty steep stairs to make it up! Most of the temples in the Ankor empire were built from sandstone, some brought in from over 60km away by thousands of elephants (this is back in the 800-1100!) Incredible!

Next, we biked into Angkor Thom, which means the "living city". Apparently at the apex of the Angkor Empire, the area had over 1 million residents. Marc & I were imagining how bustling and vibrant things must have been back then! We spent the next 4 hours or so in Angkor Thom, exploring the Bayon (see photo on the left), Baphuon, the Terrace of Elephants, Terrance of the Leper King, and the Phimeanakas (see photo on the right). Like Angkor Wat, both Bayon and Baphuon required a fair amount of climbing, so it was quite an active day for us already by lunchtime! We were glad to sit and cool down a little over lunch.

We then thought we should try to make it to check out the West Baray (which was basically one of the large water catchment areas of the Angkor Empire, but failed to check the map before biking in the wrong direction... and then it suddenly started to storm! So we ended up holing up at the North Gate for about 20-25 mins before the rain subsided enough for us to turn back around to go to the West Gate towards the Baray. About 20 mins into our bike ride though some rather muddy and uneven terrain, we realized that the map we have been looking at were probably not to scale and the baray seemed much further than we had thought. A local boy biked up next to us and took us down some even muddier and more treacherous trails before we come to an area where we could actually see a little bit of the baray (given that the wet season hasn't fully started yet, the water levels are really low). We were really quite beat and completely drenched in sweat by then, and so decided that an attempt to bike around the Baray was a loss cause and so then headed back. Of course, on the way back, I took a bit of a spill when my bike slipped going up a wooden ramp (which was wet and slick from the rain). Fortunately, other than a few minor bruises I was pretty much unscathed -- Marc (who was biking behind me) said the incident looked much worse than it turned out. The ride back to our guesthouse was rather painful for me -- I was beat from such a long day out, and so I was visibly slowing down with each mile. Marc & I were both thankful to make it back when we did as another storm was brewing, and even happier to take showers! We explored the downtown area of Siem Reap that evening and needless to say slept really well last night!

Oh, and I just realized that I never go around to blogging about my visit to the Wildlife Sanctuary/ Zoo in Phnom Tamao (about 40km south of Phnom Penh) last week. It was too bad Marc had to be in the field for the 2nd day of pilot testing, but I had a great time. This is a bit out of the way from PP, but a real gem. I saw sun bears, tigers, leopards, elephants, a variety of monkeys & gibbons, pythons, civets, otters among others. On the way back I stopped at the Killing Fields (where the thousands of Cambodians were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge), which was a somber experience.

Also, the Cambodian cooking class I took last Thursday was pretty good. It was a relatively small group of 5 tourists, and we were taken on a a visit to the wet market and shown the various local vegetables and spices before heading to a rooftop cooking school. Over the course of a few hours, we learned how to make Fried chicken sausage wrapped in banana flower; Pomelo and Shrimp Cheviche salad; Yellow and Red Curry paste (Kreoung); Chicken, sweet potato and vegetable curry; and a Pumpkin Custard dessert. We would cook a dish and eat together before moving on to the next dish, so we got to socialize quite a bit with each other, which was rather fun too as I got to hear about other people's travels so far and get & share recommendations. Oh, I did find a yoga studio and took 2 Yoga Flow classes on Friday AM (before heading off to the Zoo) and Sat AM (before meeting Marc & Jenny for dim sum)!

~ Shuwen