The second day we decided to drive the 28 km in our little rickety tuk tuk with Ti to the “Lady Temple”. Oh my goodness, small but mighty! It is believed that Banteay Srei was built and carved by women because of the delicacy. This temple is in pretty good shape and they have a lovely visitor center and restoration is in progress. By far, one of our top 2 favorite temples.

The second, Banteay Sarem, is in total disrepair. What a shame…there is a little bit of structural support in place but the carvings are rapidly deteriorating.

Both last night and tonight we headed to Pub Street which is lined with more “western” style restaurants. Buzz devoured a crocodile burger tonight. My stomach was not so great and some of the dreaded diarrhea was back. (on the way to the Lady Temple, I really had to go so asked Ti to find a bathroom. We passed up a number of restaurants and he picked a machine repair shop to ask them if I could use their toilet!!)

The third morning, Ti met us at 5:30am so we could witness the sunrise at Angor Wat. Using flashlights to negotiate uneven stone walkways and stairs, we found one of the few spots to sit down. The crowd was crazy! The sunrise was beautiful. Unfortunately, I didn’t see much of it. I really started feeling sick and moved to a different place so I could lean against a tree. So these beautiful pictures were taken by Buzz.

I have never come so close to passing out in my life….have no idea what the problem was; all I knew is that I had to go back to the hotel. So we came back and I slept most of the day and Buzz hung out at the pool and took a little trip to find a packing tube for a lantern we bought in Hoi An. We had purchased tickets for the Phare Circus for that night so I rallied.

From the Phare Cambodian Circus website:

More than just a circus, Phare, the Cambodian Circus (www.PhareCircus.org) performers use theater, music, dance and modern circus arts to tell uniquely Cambodian stories; historical, folk and modern. The young circus artists will astonish you with their energy, emotion, enthusiasm and talent.

Phare artists are students and graduates from Phare Ponleu Selpak’s (www.phareps.org) vocational training centre in Battambang. The association was formed 20 years ago by 8 young men coming home from a refugee camp after the Khmer Rouge regime. They were greatly helped by art therapy and wanted to share this new skill among the poor, socially deprived and troubled youngsters in Battambang. They founded an art school and public school followed to offer free education. A music school and theatre school were next and finally, for the kids who wanted more, the circus school. Today more than 1,200 pupils attend the public school daily and 500 attend the alternative schools. Phare Ponleu Selpak also has extensive outreach programs, trying to help with the problems highlighted in their own tales.

Phare The Cambodian Circus offers these students and graduates somewhere to hone their skills and a place to earn a decent wage. Money that will take them out of poverty and give them self-respect and freedom.

The show was fabulous; the energy these young folks had was astounding; their enthusiasm contagious. The story told was about an old woman remembering her years living through the Pol Pot reign of terror. They handled the horrors effectively and creatively. Meanwhile, a young man with some deformities painted large canvases related to the action of the acrobats. The two musicians on drums and Cambodian xylophone played an original composition for the 60 minute show.

We had taken a remork to the show and he wanted to wait for us but we told him no thanks. So, as we are leaving the venue, which holds about 400 mostly Western people, there are literally dozens and dozens of drivers waiting to get a fare. One driver walks right up to us and says his friend told him to come pick us up. We laughed and were like, yea, right. So I said, “Then you know where we are going?” and he replied with the name of our hotel!!!! He really was sent to pick us up!!! How did he pick us out of the crowd??

Because I was still feeling under the weather, we decided to cancel our plans to go to Battambang and ride the Bamboo Train (so bummed) but I just was not feeling well enough yet and we had the two temples we wanted to see the most left to do. So we hung out, shopped, and sat by the pool for a day to recharge.

The mother of the Angkorian temples, Angor Wat, and it’s more famous cousin (movie set for Laura Croft: Tomb Raider) were still yet to see. Angor Wat is a very cool temple. It is quite large and it is on 400 acres. It was not in as good a shape as I thought it would be; the towers are really beaten up but as you can see from the pictures, the left tower is being restored. The top part of the temple, the Bakan, is open to 100 people at a time. Apparently the wait can be extensive judging by the signs announcing a 45 minutes wait, etc which were fortunately set off to the side while we were there.  A quick 10 minute wait and we were granted access to climb the ridiculously steep staircase. But thank goodness that staircase was there; the original steps are unclimbable. After powering up the stairs, my legs shook for 5 minutes afterwards! But we were rewarded with beautiful vistas in all directions. But the real beauty of Angkor Wat is in the bas reliefs friezes that covered a huge part of the ground level galleries. They depicted various Indian battles; the temple started out as Hindu and gradually was switched over to Buddhist. The detail and scale of the friezes are incredible.

Final temple stop was Ta Prohm. This was our second favorite temple. The strangler figs are destroying the temple but are also the only thing holding parts of it up! This temple was quite a complex; we actually got kind of lost trying to find our way out! Guess we have to put Laura Croft: Tomb Raider on our list of movies to watch.

Well, that about does it! We are home now and trying to adjust to the new time here. I will be posting an “Epilogue” in the next few days.