Cambodia Excursion - Day 3

Today is also another long day of touring. Breakfast was okay (included in the hotel) - bread and omelette. Left at 8 am for the grand tour of temples today.

We passed by a local market so took a quick stop to see how it was. And it was interesting - very congested and one can get lost! Did end up buying some nice slippers!

First stop Pre Rup. Was unique as there as a cremation place in it.

Neak Pean was unique. Very quite and peaceful place. The center of the temple was unique as it had two snakes with tails entwined and a statue of a horse saving a man. Interesting!

Preah Khan. After a while these temples merge into one another. Unless there is something different about them, they can start blending into one another.

The key thing is that a number of these were either Shiva or Vishnu temples that are presently Buddhist temples now.  One can see remnants of the shivling in many of these temples.

After a coconut water break it was Sras Srong temple - also very pretty - still had a lot of apsaras and carvings and the trees growing in the temples.

The last one for the day was the walk a mountain, the Phnom Bakheng mountain, to see Angkor Wat from high up. It took about 20 mins to get up. It was humid and I was exhausted. The view was amazing. It would have been even more amazing if we had been able to see the sunset; but as usual the clouds interfered. There was a also a nice temple on the top with Buddha's foot - 6 ft foot! How?

Was not really capable to doing anything else after such a touring day. On the way back to the hotel saw some lovely elephants dressed up for tourists :-) Also bought some lychees which were just too sweet!

Sam went out for shopping, whereas I stayed back at the hotel to get my free massage. And then Sam got his. Then it was time for dinner - which was pizza today - excellent pizza!

I can see that the Cambodia postings are becoming more of a picture show....but really I did not write down everything that the guide was saying. Some temples had some interesting history, but otherwise they are just different temples built at different times, some by kings, some by priests and some for specific purpose etc...