It is our last full day in Siem Reap, Cambodia and we haven't seen the temples at Angkor Wat yet! Given that is the reason why 99.99% of tourists come here then we thought we had better go. We booked the tour over dinner last night with Sinn. We decided to do the main Angkor Wat temple at 8.30 in the morning and then start again at 3pm to see the Ta Phrom (Tomb Raider) temple and the sunset at Bakheng.

We had a driver and a tour guide pick us up from the hotel on time. The driver was a very sensible and calm looking chap who reminded me a little bit of the guy from the 'Killling Fields' movie. The tour guide was also very friendly and talkative, but his English pronunciation was very difficult to understand. He was a mine of information, but I simply couldn't understand a word of it, so I left Gill to listen to him and tried to pick up the highlights.

The main temple at Angkor Wat is incredible. It is a massive site surrounded by a man-made moat. It was built by King Jayasomethingorother II, I think, but I couldn't be certain, just as a monument. It wasn't built for the people or monks to pray, just as a temple for the King. Rocks were carried from 65kms away by elephant and by boat in the wet saeson. It took 3,000 people 37 years to built. In all he built over 100 other temples as well as the one here to ensure he ended up somewhere nice in the afterlife.

It was originally a Hindu temple built for the god Vishnu and his wife Lakshme, but it later changed into a Buddhist temple and back again a couple of times from what I can gather. Each one of these switches involved chopping off many statues heads and selling them for profit over the border. The result is that alot of the statues are missing their heads and there are alot of Buddahas missing altogether.

It is still a very impressive sight and you can see why it took so long to build. Almost all of the walls are carved with either inscriptions or Apsara dancers. There are also some sections of the walls with bullet holes from the civil war. All in all Cambodia has been involved in civil war for around 40 years since the French left. Only a short period of that involved the Khmer Rough, but they managed to murder more than 1 million people during their 5 years in charge. Most of the people were killed for being educated. You could even be killed for wearing glasses, which were illegal.

This fairly disastrous recent past accounts for a lot of Cambodia's under-development. Now they have an elected government, but corruption is rife and many of the ministers in the current government were a part of the Khmer Rouge regime.

After a tour of Angkor Wat we went back to the hotel for lunch and a swim. At 3pm we headed out to Ta Prohm which is just past the big temple. It is famous from the Tomb Raider films and has spung trees growing on top of the temple ruins with great roots enveloping the temple walls. It was left ruined for hundreds of years but id now being restored. Some of the tree roots are incredible and it is amazing that the walls are still standing. It was quite busy and we kept getting caught up with a group of Korean tourists.

We then drove to Bakheng at around 4.30 to walk up the hill and catch the sunset. Unfortunately we were just too late to catch an elephant ride up the hill so we had to walk. It was very busy up at the top of the temple walls. Hundreds of people trying to get in the shade and get a picture of the sunset.We got our picture and headed back to the hotel.

We then went into town for dinner in a tuk-tuk to eat at Il Forno. James was tired so we went home and left the girls to do some final bits of shopping in the night markets.