For our second day at Angkor, we rose a little less early and took a tuk-tuk tour booked the night before to the 4 temples we still wanted to see, which were much further a field. We departed at 6 AM and got to our first temple around 8 AM, after stopping for some colorful petrol, which our tuk-tuk driver said he needed to borrow money from us to buy. As we saw in Mexico, for measurement the gas is first loaded into defined-sized reused bottles (like bottled water bottles) before going into the tank. In fact, two times today as we were finishing a 1.5 liter bottle of water and looking for a receptacle, we had someone walk up to us and ask to have them.
Our first sight, Kbal Spean, was something of an animist water temple. Basically they carved an array of holy symbols and pictures right
into the riverbed, blessing the water as it passed over before it got to town. The effect (and especially the photos) were somewhat diminished on account of it being the dry season and there being almost no water. But still, it was pretty neat.
Yes, those bumps are phalluses. And the one that appears to be a face is a female symbol, if we remember correctly.
We also saw a young pineapple tree.
This waterfall is supposed to be very nice for bathing in the wet season.
Next up was Banteay Srei, a small temple with some of the best carvings in Angkor.
These guardians are replicas, the originals having been removed to a museum.
Next stop was Ta Som, which also had a nice tree, but fewer visitors than the similar temple yesterday. We exchanged photo favors with a Japanese (?) tourist, who seems to actually know how to take good photos! You might just see this one on the wall at our house someday.
Most of the rest of Ta Som wasn't that interesting, but note the support holding up the wall on the right!
Our final Angkor temple was Neak Pean, which is situated in the middle of a square man-made lake, surrounded by 4 other square man-made lakes. Unfortunately, they didn't have water in them, but on the bright side, that did mean we got to walk out to the temple, which otherwise would have required a boat to reach.
After this, we ate 3 pineapples between us. They are really cute the way they prepare them.
By the time we got back to Siem Reap it was around 3 PM, and we were feeling like we'd seen everything at Angkor we wanted to see. We felt a little lame for only spending like a day and a half at Angkor after all the work to get here, and with the way everyone else says you need at least 3 days to do it right, but when you look at the hours, it was around 21, which actually is like 3 days of sightseeing. We just packed it into 2 days. No wonder we were so exhausted!
We took a taxi back to the border, and then hopped a bus to Bangkok that was leaving right as we arrived on the Thai side. We'd hoped to catch a night bus straightaway down to Phuket, but it seemed to be too late to get one, at least from the North Bus Terminal where we found ourselves. After much hemming and hawing, we finally decided to take the city bus down to the Khao San, the area where we stayed before, and knew our way around such that we'd feel safe walking there even very late at night. For a miracle, the bus was even still running at quarter to midnight, though it was a long wait.
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