Its a very long flight from Vancouver to Perth and there is no such thing as a direct flight...
And if there was then it would be something like 18-20 hours long!.
I ended up booking my flight through Hong Kong for price and availability, but I have no real urge to spend any time there.
But for the return flight, I decided Id use the stop-over to take another little break somewhere in SE Asia. Even though Ive been to Thailand before, I decided to book a short hop return flight to Bangkok to use as a "base of opperations" and take the opportunity to do a little touristing...
And, first on the list of things to go see was the well known temples of "Angkor Wat"...
But thats not in Thailand, its next door in Cambodia. So, after a day or two of acclimatising to the tropics in Bangkok, I hopped on a bus for the day long trip across the boarder to the city of Siem Reap. And then I spent a day checking out the legendary temples...
I should state here that I didnt really have too great a expectations of the place for a couple of reasons... First off, the temples have been a major tourist attraction since the end of the second world war (barring a decade or so when the Cambodian boarders were closed to all foreigners). So, I expected that there would be absolutely nothing that was remotely "un-touristy" or "remote/authentic".
And secondly, I've had plenty of encounters with other travellers over the years who have been there and have told me more or less what to expect.
So, with those thoughts in mind, Id decided to go see it anyway and in the end, I got about what I was expecting...
Thats probably a bit hard on the place really because its a very impressive group of temples and it is without doubt a marvel for its time (1000 -1500 years old or so). And it is clear that there were massive feats of earth moving and stone carving canal digging, and engineering etc. The structures are, in my mind, on par with the Aztec and Inca citys of central America and Peru, and the Hindu city of Kajuraho too.
... Incidentally, Angkor Wat has a great deal more in common with Kajuraho than I had thought... I'd thought Angkor was a Buddhist temple, but it was in fact built as a Hindu temple to the god Vishnu, and later became used as a Buddhist temple (Many of the temples at the site have mixed Hindu/Buddhist architecture/symbology.
Back to my personal experiences...
The challenge for me though was as expected... the tourists (of which, I was of course one)... There were absolutely "Hordes" of us and especially groups of Japanese tourists... And they were all very nice and polite, if a bit noisy. And the site is more or less "in Japan's back-yard" so to speak, so I have absolutely nothing against them (or anyone else for that matter) being there and "doing their thing " at all... Its just challenging for me personally... The site sees more than 10,000 tourists each day!!
Anyway, other than that, I guess I found it all a bit "smaller" than I'd expected... Its funny how we form our expectations of scale... I guess it mostly comes from other people's descriptions in our imaginations, and Holywood's imagery...
Lots of pictures, and I find that I'm "Way out of practice at photo taking", but here they are:
