Day Three; The temples

If the shock of getting up at 5.30am yesterday was not enough, we were up today at 4.30am to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat!
Sunrise was a bit of a let down; a cloudy morning meant it was far from spectacular; and alas as the light hit the temple the biggest thing we were greeted with was a large sheet of green scaffolding. But from back on the main road the sunrise did look quite nice over the river and the entrance walls (though it took alot of positioning to take a snap shot not interrupted by the hundreds of other tourists).

Our tour guide seemed to want to fill every moment of silence that fell upon us with commentary and after almost thirty minutes of uninterrupted speech he stopped only after he had added, with an intense look of concentration, that 'this [Angkor Wat] is man made. Ok, this man made not natural, was built. Noooo natural, man made. Ok!'. Hope we're all taking notes...? And meanwhile very randomly to our left was a Chinese man with a wind pipe tract thing fitted; who sounded like something out of the exorcist each time he spoke, which when we were sat in total darkness to begin with was far too much like comic genius for 5am, and we all ended up in tears trying not to laugh at the set up; sat on a wall in the dark listening to our tour guides random and lengthy spiels of semi-coherent information interrupted sporadically by the gargles of the grim reaper!

We ate breakfast at Agkor Wat then headed to Ta Prohm (tomb raider) which is the temple that has trees growing all over it:

After that we went to another temple (the name escapes me) that had a cool bridge lined with Buddha statues:

And after that was Bayon. I think this temple is summed up best in the words of our tour guide (who by now I had decided was actually somewhat adorable and actually very knowledgeable) 'all theses so big faces, these big Buddah smiley faces':

We had lunch and finally we went back to Angkor wat and spent about an hour there (dyyyyying in the heat):

oops there goes that gorgeous green scaffolding...

After we were dropped back in our hotel a group of us girls decided to go and get $4 pedicures. Then we hung out in our rooms for a couple of hours, and had dinner in a local resteraunt. I ordered prawn kormer, garlic naan and rice (and I want to remember it forever because it was so delicious I could cry just remembering it). Anyway, we were all too tired to go out drinking, but not quite ready to go back to the hotel so...we went for a 'fish massage'. The ones where you put your feet into a tank of fish that nibble all the dead skin off for you...very fun. After about ten minutes of screaming I did end up actually really quite liking it, and my feet were silky soft afterwards. Because it was $1 I then also had a foot massage as well...my feet have never looked so good!

And that was day 2.