WANDERING TOGETHER: October 2014

We came to Cambodia for one purpose -- to see Angkor Wat -- and it did not disappoint.

For those of you who are not familiar, Angkor Wat is an ancient temple complex in Cambodia, and the largest religious monument in the world. It's a series of 1200 year old temples and structures that were part of the Khmer Empire's capital city of Angkor. They're spread out over close to 50 square miles, a ten minute drive between each of the sites.

They're all absolutely enormous--made of gigantic slabs of decaying stone that are so unreal, it feels like a massive Hollywood movie set. Both Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones were filmed at Angkor Wat and it totally makes sense.

One of the coolest aspects of Angkor Wat is how explorable it is. Unlike many western sites, Angkor Wat still feels very wild. It's very easy to feel like you are discovering an ancient city for the first time, rather than visiting a coordinated tourist attraction. Each site covers a lot of space, and there are no ropes blocking off areas, no ramps or railings installed, and very few signs. And obviously the lack of these installations will impact the sites' preservation over time, but in an of-the-moment, selfish and shortsighted kind of way, it was amazing to experience it without boundaries. You could easily imagine an ancient society living in and using these spaces. And except for the very first temple (the most famous and largest one, but probably one of the least interesting in retrospect), we found ourselves practically alone exploring and climbing the ruins.

That little red dot in the middle is me. The scale of everything is ridiculous.

A crazy long gangway crossing a swamp to the entrance of one of the temples

For the most part seeing Angkor Wat was just an incredible and transporting experience, but every once in a while there'd be a tourist to remind you that it's 2014 and what has our world come to:

Can't go wrong with matching fedoras

Aside from seeing the temples, one awesome part of the experience is the transportation between sites. The town of Siem Reap (2 miles from the temple complex where the hotels and restaurants are) has somehow standardized the tours and created a sweet (and fairly organized) system for getting tourists around Angkor. An incredibly reasonable day rate of 15 US dollars gets you a personal driver with his own tuk tuk who knows the temple loop and where to stop for lunch.

Lunch stop

We've learned through many a tuk tuk ride in other countries, that the tuk tuk is usually much more than just a cheap three-wheeled taxi--for tourists it can be quite stressful, as it's often a high pressure selling venue for the driver who wants you to book a hotel through him or make a quick stop at a friend's souvenir shop so we can "just take a look," all while squeezing aggressively through dense traffic. This is not the experience in Siem Reap. Not only are the roads around the sites wide and tree-lined with little to no traffic, but our driver Bunna was so laid back and friendly that we had almost as much fun driving between sites as we did exploring them.

He would drop us off at a temple, tell us the name, then explain that he'd be waiting on the other side to pick us up whenever we were done. While we visited each temple, Bunna would rig up this sweet hammock in his tuk tuk and doze:

And apparently that's just part of the gig, as all of the tuk tuk drivers seemed to have a hammock to sleep in:

And finally, I will leave you all with some pictures of my favorite part of the sites. Nature seems to have taken over in Angkor over the last 1000 years and there are trees, big trees, up in these temples. Here are some of those trees: