Today was my birth place and what an interesting place to spend it. it started outat 5am watching the sunrise over the Angkor Wat temple. Then we went back to the hotel to eat breakfast then went back to Angkor Wat to tour the temple. I heard someone say it was going to be 104 degrees and it was extremely humid. I lot count of how much water I drank. I started out with 2 frozen water bottles, got another one at every stop, had one for lunch and bought 2 more cokes along the way. Angkor Wat was actually the least interesting og the three places we went today. The places have been destroyed any may not last much longer. Apparently the team that restored it actually destroyed it. Somehow the chemical they used to clean and restore it all instead is disolving it. The temple is a huge complex made of sandstone. The second place we went to was Ankor Thom. This is a place that has trees growing through the sandstone templed giving it an all new look. They call this the jungle temple. They said that part of the movie Tomb Raider was filmed here. I’ll have to go back to watch that. What is interesting is that the temple is about 900 years old, the huge trees, almost redwood sized, are about 300 years old. The trees have grown through the temple complex, sometime destroying them in the process, other times holding them other. But in a way just some weird accident turned it into a magical place. These temples were buried by jungle before being refound only around the 1940’s. Now 95% of the local people’s job is tourism related. The last place we visited was Bayon. Which is another amazing temple that they don’t know what it’s purpose was. There are over 100 large stone carved faces. For these things all I can really do to explain it is to say look
for the pictures when I get them posted. It was physically miserable because of the weather but what a unique place to be on your birthday. I’m not exactly sure what we are visiting tomorrow, hopefully it will be as interesting as today. We will go from 8:30 to about 3:30. that will be the final touring. Then we take a 5pm flight to Phenom Phem, stay the night there and have an early flight from there to Taipei then LA and finally home again. At least the flight is only 12 hours home isntead of 14.
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