Harrison Ford eat your heart out

Today was our first day, of our three day pass, wandering the ancient city of Angkor north of Siem Reap. Actually that's not totally true, we were there yesterday as well at Phnom Bakheng to watch the sunset, which looked like something out of a movie. I kept being reminded of Jurassic Park, which is kind of how the whole thing felt minus the velociraptors. While we were up there we kept hearing this dull roar that made even the stones shake.

Taylor: "That must be the T-Rex"

Dustin: "You have a T-Rex?"

Taylor: "We have a T-Rex!"

It didn't take us long to realize it was the airport, which is pretty close by.

To start the day off, we did something that probably only our fathers would have done (not that we like to admit it) and got up around 4 a.m. to watch the sun rise over Angkot Wat. Well, our fathers and about 900 other tourists from Japan unloading from air-conditioned buses with cameras that made ours look like a cellphone. We had sorted out transportation the night before, and ended up renting single speed bikes from our guesthouse which we rode through the unlit streets of Siem Reap 7 or 8 km to the main wat. Stunning.

To try beating the crowds we figured we'd check out some other temples that people hadn't gotten to yet, then redo the main temple on the third day. This turned out to be a good idea, as it gave us about 20 minutes alone at a temple that turned out to be my favourite, Bayon. Let's jsut say that if Indiana Jones and Lara Croft had a kid, it would look something like this:

After that we wandered/pedalled pretty aimlessly, dodging kids selling postcards and ladies trying to seduce us with cold drinks along the way. I'm serious, they have it down to an art that's almost sexual...."Sir you want coooold drink? Mmmmm, cooooold?". Needless to say, we succumbed more than once. As for the postcard selling children, we developed a unique strategy to deal with them. When they ask us to buy, buy buy, and they don't let up, we play a little game.

"No no, you've got it all backwards. WE sell YOU postcard! Special price for you, three for $1."

This tends to perplex the little kiddies a bit, sometimes enough that they stop bothering us and other times just enough to get them to like us so they'll NEVER leave us alone. Which isn't such a bad thing, their English is often great and knowledge of Canadian statistics staggering. AT one point Dustin tried to explain to one of them what a biplane was. So now you understand why watching him talk to people almost kills me. Anyways, once we talk to them long enough we just give them a postcard of Kingston, or the 1000 Islands or something. Yep, that's us, spreading Canadiana all over the world. You can thank us later, Stephen.

Here's one of the temples we fund along the way. Lets just say that if Indiana Jones and Lara Croft had a kid, it would look something like this:

So that's our day, all 12 hours of it. Temple of the day? Well, Angkor Wat, I guess. Because frig. It's Angkor Wat. Anyways it's past 8:30 now, and my body decided it was bedtime hours ago. That and we've got another early start tomorrow, we're planning to hijack a tuk tuk and make the driver take us to far away temples. If that fails I guess we could just pay him. More to come (uploading pictures in uber slow here)!