Up nice and early to enjoy my warm shower! And get ready for the day. I was ready early so whatsapp’ed Richard to say I was on my way and wandered out to find a tuk tuk. There wasn’t one, but there was a moto and for $1 he knew where they were staying and agreed to take me there.
It soon became obvious he didn’t know where he was going as he wanted to cross the river, but all I knew was that they were staying on the same road as me so that wasn’t correct. We drove the length of the road and neither of us stopped it. We asked a tuk tuk driver who gave him some directions, we headed back, turned off the road, drove around the back streets and eventually stopped to ask another tuk tuk driver who had the bright idea of phoning for directions! So off we went again, this time stopping outside anything that looked like a guesthouse and eventually we found it, almost at the end of the road – I guessed it as I knew they had a pool! It had taken us 30 mins to do a 5 minute journey – good job I was ready early – lesson learnt, double check they know where they’re going!
Had scrambled eggs and toast and strawberry jam for breakfast – an odd combo but had 1 piece as eggs and 1 piece for jam.
After that it was gone 7:30 and no sign of the guy taking us to the temples. My first thought was that I could have had a lay in!! In the end after phoning and chasing he arrived at 9am. We weren’t impressed, especially when he wanted an extra $5 each than the price we were quoted, but it did mean we had time for an extra coffee!!!
Then we were on our bikes, helmets and front suspension – fancy!
The route all day was pretty flat, I only used 1 gear the entire day. We cycled the 10ish km out to the ticket booth – $20 for a day pass and you have your photo on it! Then off we went into the official temple site.
And what a sight met us. I’d purposely not really looked in the guidebook or at photos so that I really was almost seeing it for the first time. But I’m fairly sure that, like the Taj Mahal, no picture will ever do justice to what you see – although I do have 100s of photos trying to capture it!
Not wanting to bore you with another temple report and I can’t even post photos until my photo uploaded thing starts working again, so I’ll tell you that I had my first ever fresh coconut experience at Angkor Wat – the 3 of us shared one – it was massive, but so tasty and nothing like the ‘coconut water’ that’s the new big thing at home. Lunch was also v yummy and well needed, cycling in the heat was hard work despite the route being flat.
By the last temple I was fed up of being hareassed to by books, phota, trousers etc, so when, on the walk to the temple, a man said something to me I just firmly said ‘no thank you’ and kept going…… In fact what he wanted was to see my ticket! Oops!
I was very sad that we couldn’t stay to see sunset, but our bikes had no lights and the roads no lights either. We could see it on our route home, it looked amazing – a great excuse to have to go back!
Our guide reckoned we’d done about 30km by the time we got back to the guesthouse. Plenty enough for 1 day!!
We sat out in the garden and shared an Anchor, an Ankor and a Sprite!
As there were no tuk tuks around to give me a lift back, one of the guys who worked there said he’d give me a lift back to mine, I then had a quick shower before Richard and Alla came to collect me and we headed to a restaurant I’d read about in my guidebook – Sugar Palm – Gordon Ramsey had been there, so we thought we’d take a look.
So glad we did, the food was delicious and perfect for our run the next day.
emma ross runs 