Tomb Raider

I have finally seen Angkor.

I first saw photos of Angkor in National Geographic when I was about 5 years old, and like everyone else I knew it was pretty special. So I backed up my camera memory to CD & had 2Gbytes of photos available...unfortunately I was also drinking vodka and redbulls last night...conveniently served in a large plastic bucket...thus when I got home last night I was thinking only about my pillow and not about charging my camera's battery. I did get 6 pictures before terminal battery failure occured.

Ta Prom was even better than I had imagined. (This is the temple slowly being consumed by trees in the jungle that was used famously as a location for the Tomb Raider movie)

Being able to walk & climb & touch just about everything was such a buzz. There were heaps of statues, carvings etc just lying around in piles or having fallen down just left lying where it dropped. Many of the statues have been removed or have had there heads chiseled off so as to be sold to private collectors. Thankfully I have been told that at night there is a lot of security and theft isn 't a real problem any more. This is not a country with a lot of public liability concerns, so at the moment it's pretty much "access all areas".There is some pretty major developments underway including recreating many of the buildings entirely...I can't imagine the same sense of wonder wandering around a building that has been jointly built by a French/Cambodian consortium in 2009 as there is wandering around a temple built in the 12th Century.

More temples tomorrow, getting up at 4AM to make sure that I am there for sunrise...no buckets for the D-Man tonight :) Hoping to do a balloon ride over Angkor Wat.

Only a couple of days left in Cambodia...then back to Bangkok...