Two magnificent days spent among the temples of Angkor. Wauw. Some of them are quite nice... but there are a lot of temples and after a while they sort of just all look the same.... So yes, we did indeed manage to become 'templed-out' as the saying goes.

But, we arrived in Siem Reap sunday afternoon where I last wrote an update and then we spend monday+tuesday looking at temples. We rented bicycles and drove around on our own. Quite funny as Siem Reap is a medium size city with only 4 traffic lights... For the rest they just weave into the flow, which they do manage quite well. But it can be confusing if you want to go straight and cars from the opposite direction are suddenly in your lane because they have to turn left soon. But, it means that one does not really have to worry about the traffic, everybody are considerate towards eachother and you can pretty much cross a street without looking (of course you won't, but you could!).

Monday we focused on the main temples - aweinspiring, well-preserved Angkor Wat aka The Mother Of All Temples aka The Largest Religious Complex On Earth etc... Weird mysterious Bayon - from outside at a first glance it just looks like a shabby ruin with grimy rocks but uipon closer examination you seem gigantic faces carved out in the stones (see picture) which is a bit eerie when venturing around the temple.... Ta Prohm aka The Tomb Raider Temple where a scene for the first movie was shot. Here you can see the struggle between manmade structures and nature. During the dark historic times of Cambodian recent history the temples were pretty much left on their own and this temple suffered particularly much under this neglect. Today it is somewhat swalled by trees and roots, plants and algees. Fascinating and one can understand why Hollywood directors have chosen to shoot scenes for an action movie here. We also saw some more smaller temples and then we couldn't take any more in.

Tuesday we spent 'temple-hopping'' - just biking around and stopping at some minor temples as we rolled past them if we felt like it. We also has to spend a bit of time hiding from the rain and at one point a thunder storm threatening and we hurriedly biked along hoping to escape... which we did:)

Today we hired ourselves a tuk-tuk driver pretty much for most of the day - in the morning we went to see a very small temple 40km away from town and man am I glad we did. It was beautiful with extremely well-preserved intricate stone carvings and built from stones with a slight pink hue. Nice and quite - something for the ladies:) We subsequently went to visit a Landmine museum where one could really feel the pressure of Cambodias dark past. The man running the museum was s child soldier under the Khmer Rouge Regime where he would place landmines. This continued for a while until he deserted and joined the Vietnamese forces. After the Khmer Rouge regime and Pol Pot was removed from power he started removing landmines on his own - initially using only a stick and a knife for this process. He estimates that to date he has removed 50000 landmines....!!!! Within recent years he has received training in the UK and now officially works with several NGO's on this important project. Finally we went to see the floating villages south of Siem Reap at the Tonlé Sap Lake. Normally the water in the rivers flows southwards but during the rainy season there is just too much water around and the system experiences a clog where Tonle Sap river meets the Mekong river at Phnom Penh causing the river to reverse its flows and flood a large portion of the land around the lake. For this reason people have accomodated for this and hence lives on floating houses such that they can just follow the lake around irrespective of the size of this. Seeing the village was fun and interesting and fascinating. Unfortunately the tour made us a bit uncomfortable as they wanted us to 'support the children'of a local school - hence they wanted us to buy writing pads or pencil and then go distribute this to the children at the nearest school. Something that we did not feel like doing. We would of course like to support the school but the whole scenario of us acting as rich benefactors coming bearing gifts made us extremely uncomfortable as it was all just so fake. But, anyway we felt pressured into buying something... which we did... 10 pencils for 3dollars - ridiculous - but then we gave those to our boat guide and told him to give them to the kids as we sure didn't want to. Anyway, we are now getting ready to get on a nightbus for Sihanoukville - they advertise with 'long leg' so hopefully this means Anders should be somewhat comfortable!

Otherwise Cambodia seems nice so far except for the persistant excessant almost pestering of tuk-tuk drivers, shop keepers and sometimes small children... Which we did not experience in Laos at any point. So this probably just goes to show the negative consequences of having a struggling, semi-poor country being exposed to mass tourism too quickly.

Hugs from Mette:)