Oh my! It was hot last night, and the beds were hard. As you can gather, we did not get a good night's sleep. We all got up, sticky and a bit grumpy! Having a cold water wash down (with the bucket and pail) helped for about 5 minutes, but then it was back to sticky once again.
After a traditional breakfast of rice and noodles we loaded up into the our Cambodian Tuk tuks and headed to the temples. Along the way we stopped by a cashewnut farm to look at how cashew nuts are grown. It was interesting to see that the nut part is only a small part of the fruit. A single tree can give over a kilogram of cashew nuts each harvest.
The temple Zone of Sambor Prei Kuk means 'the temple in the richness of the foesrt'. The temple complex was incredible, and sad at the same time. It used to be a complex of over 300 temples but only a fraction of them still remain. Some were lost due to nature taking over, but many were destroyed by US bombs as part of both the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. Walking through the complex, you can clearly see some of the bomb craters and some of the damage to the temples it has caused. The surviving temples themselves are going through a lot of conservation effort, first spearheaded by the Japanese government and now through UNESCO.
Some of the temples are amazing, and the scale of them is staggering. We think this is going to set the scene for us tomorrow when we visit Angkor Wat. Some temples were square and other octagonal - the octagonal temples are seen to represent the flying octagonal palace of Indra or Vimana Trivistapa.
After the temples, we headed back to the homestay for lunch before setting off to Siep Reap. Once we checked in, the first course of action was to jump into the swimming pool. It was BLISS! To finally be able to cool off for a bit.
We thought that we should wait a little bit for it to cool off. Ha, the joke was on us, as even now at 9pm at night the temperature is 33oC and sticky. But we still had lovely walk around the city before heading back to the hotel, to catch up on some sleep. Especially since we are getting up early to catch the sun rise at Angkor Wat.
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