Luang Prabang, round 2 (The one with pictures)

     Our new hotel in Luang Prabang was a step up from the cramped quarters of the first time, with an amazing hot shower and place enough to put our bags down and walk around.  The doors didn't lock, but we were the only guests and the staff had a spare key anyways.  The door to the balcony didn't even close properly, but it looked out on the same river as before and that was only a problem when we needed the aircon.

     The three of us were filthy and exhausted from the trip and only went out to cross the river and look for the pizza restaurant.  The restaurant was in somebody's backyard, with an oven at one side and a cluster of tiki torches at the other.  There were only three or four tables and one veggie option but two pizzas were perfect for us and they were delicious.

      Unable to sleep, my mom researched elephants.  The mahouts had told us that, contrary to popular belief, elephants only have a memory of two or three minutes but now we hypothesize that they only say that because if the don't pay attention he/she will stop walking and start looking for bamboo.  But come on--it's completely unrelated to memory: if you had a chance to stop hauling trees around and grab a snack wouldn't you take it?  In structure and complexity, elephants' brains are similar to humans', and they are among the most intelligent animals (up there with cetaceans and primates).  Elephants are very altruistic, one account telling of how an elephant refused to lower a log into a pit until the dog, until then unseen, had been lifted out and got out of danger.  
     They will self-medicate, chewing the leaves of a certain tree to induce labor (kenyan women do the same thing).
     In the wild, the whole family will stay together for life and though the elephant center probably doesn't have much of a choice it is amazingly cruel to separate a mother and baby pair after three years.  Bonds between elephants are formed for life.  See the heartbreaking story of Tina (Elephant society section).
     The next morning, after cheese sandwiches at the hotel, we walked to the old royal palace.  Built in 1904 for King Sisavang Vong and his family it was converted to a museum in 1975 when communists overthrew the monarchy.  The walls in many rooms are covered in Japanese glass mosaics.  No pictures were allowed, but you can see some here.  The style is unique because the whole wall isn't tiled; just the figures in mirrored glass on a red background.  Many of the scenes were either bizarre, surreal, or violent, depicting horses with elephant trunks and  tusks and numerous beheaded people.  Some seem to have taken off their heads with their own sword but that's probably a misinterpretation.  
     The royal bedrooms were spartan and huge.  The large beds were dwarfed by the twenty-five-foot ceilings and even longer width, and apart from the bed the room was only filled with a large armoire, an electric fan, and a misshapen portrait.  Maybe the ceilings were to keep the room cool or maybe for grandness, but if the latter it was not effective.

                                    

  In the hallways there were drawings from a Buddhist legend of a prince who was exiled.  He was  hardly a sympathetic character despite (we think) being Buddha's last incarnationwe think) beingBuddhas last incarnation and getting the happy ending of returning to his kingdom and ruling, as he tried to sell his children to a corrupt Brahman.  His mother, upon finding that she was to be the mother of Buddha, got ten wishes form the gods and one of them was for 'Eyebrows as blue as a bumblee's wings'.  I feeling like I'm missing something here... I didn't even know bumblebees had blue wings.  

     The room with the floating Buddha was almost as opulently decorated as the Buddhas in the royal palace in Phnom Penh and the cathedral of the most expensive Virgin Mary in Bolivia.  Horrifyingly, four pairs of elephant tusks in varying sizes made a sort of aisle up to the Buddha.

 

     After a short break back at the hotel room we went out looking for a book exchange and lunch.  Lunch was first, at a restaurant called the Big Tree.  I was having a down day and looking for something really tasty, but the soup was disappointing.  What's new.  
      The points where there is a risk of being splashed with cold water loud music plays as a warning and we were able to avoid it, but then there's the downside of the loud music.  The library/restaurant had only two bookshelves of English non-guidebook books but we managed to find a couple to buy and a couple to put in the library list when we get home.  The coconut chocolate milkshake was tempting, but when we were done browsing we walked to the night market.  
 
       The nightmarket is a little overwhelming and, though it fills only a couple blocks, felt endless.  We only meandered down one of the two aisles the first night before breezing through the food market, ignoring the meat, and picking up some fruit.  On our way home we looked for a milkshake place but the one we had in mind was closed and we decided to go home and eat fruit rather than look for a new one.  As soon as we made it back we decided that milkshakes would really just hit the spot and we set out gain.  Now milkshakes, but we sat down and ordered icecream before deciding that it was a crazy price for one scoop and turning around to go home. 
      The hotel was out of cheese sandwiches the next morning so I settled for the far-less-tasty egg sandwich.  My parents went out and about for bus tickets or to a bank or something in the morning, and we didn't eat lunch so we could have an early dinner at the veggie buffet in the night market.  I wanted to try everything, but all too soon my plate was filled.  Some of the spices on different dishes tasted almost identical, but it was by far the best meal in a long time.
 
     When we were done we walked down the second half of the market, but spent less time there because of the winged insects that swarmed the lamps, landed on our faces, and crawled down our shirts.  
        I've been trying off and on to get the pictures to upload without success, so when we get to Chiang Rai tomorrow I'll update this post with them in their correct places.  Bye bye, Lao!

Happy Pimai Lao (with Elephants)

     Another backlog of posts to write and increasingly short times in which to do so.  We're a few hundred kilometers away from Luang Prabang in a town called Nong Khiaw on the Nam Ou river but are leaving tomorrow for an even more remote village farther downstream that probably doesn't have wifi and may not even have electricity.  This would have been posted late last night if five paragraphs or so hadn't randomly been deleted.
      Being in a bungalow that had less of an 'inside' and 'outside' and more of an 'outside' and 'outside with a few partitions' meant that the light came in and woke me up early.  An unappetizingly eggy breakfast started at seven and at eight fifteen we went with Mae Bou Nam's mahout Pang to find her.  It was a fight through the jungle once we left the dirt road and I didn't see her until she was only a few feet away.  Pang brought her back to the road and cleaned the dirt and leaves from her back with a handful of leafy branches.  Mae Bou Nam was distracted by the bamboo shoots at the side of the road that we couldn't stop picking for her.  My dad rode on her neck for the last fifteen minutes or so before we arrived back at the buildings.
 
      He took her past the buildings to where the boats had pulled up the day before and she walked in for a swim and drink.  The other three joined her, and she and her special friend the twenty-one-year-old trumpeted when they saw eachother.  Her friend loved to swim and they went off a little ways together to duck down under the water and to scoop water into their trunks.  With only the tops of their heads emerging from the water they looked like some prehistoric aquatic animal.

        Too soon for them they were coaxed out of the water to go for a loop around one of the hills.  The path wasn't wide enough to walk two abreast but the elephants walked with exquisite balance, placing each foot directly in front of the last.  Our companions Perrine, Annemarys, and Inara rode at first and then my mother and I traded places with the latter two.  I rode Mae Do again and, once, when she stopped to eat something, I would have slipped had her mahout Sen not been sitting behind me. 
      Lunch was same same no different.  Meals are a bit of an ordeal because Annemarys is the only one of the girls to attempt to make the conversation in English, so much of the time they chatter on while we sit there wishing we had our own private language.  The veggie option was fish soup that became fish soup with most of the fish picked out when we explained that fish is meat to us.  Unfortunately I only discovered this when I reached the bottom of my bowl and found a scale.
     A Danish family arrived that afternoon and they got to spend it with the elephants.  Instead we walked to the nursery and sat on the tilting dock across from the to mother/son pairs on the other side of the inlet.  Both sons are about a year and a half old, and only have as much time again before they are separated from their mothers.  
 
      The mothers can get aggressive with eachother and so were separated by a bit of water and some trees but they didn't seem interested in one another.  After swimming and drinking for some time their mahouts had them come out and, immediately, the pair on the left began rolling in the dirt and spraying dirt over their backs. Soon they were hidden a cloud.  Their mahout apparently decided that they were too dirt and had them go back for another swim, but when they came out again they only repeated the process.  

       Once the dust settled for the last time the elephants snacked from the bamboo and grasses in the  area.  A boat came to take the girls back and then again for us. 
      With the Danes at dinner too the conversation stayed understandable and we found out that Annemarys, Perrine, and Inara are travelling for six months in South-East Asia as part of a project to make a guidebook of Eco-friendly socially-responsible organizations.  They have a list of places they need to visit and make notes about but in between stops they can go wherever they like.  The guidebook will only be written in French and not even started until they get home at the end of June but for these six months they only need to give updates and take notes.
       Another early morning to go get Our Elephant for the last time.  This time I rode her back.  It was a relief not to have to keep my eyes peeled for the teacup-sized daddy longlegs that scurry across the road.  When we emerged from the jungle Pang out his hand on his heart, turned to us, and said,  'Hoi hoc Mae Bou Nam.  That means, I love Mae Bou Nam'.  In the best cases, mahouts are born about the same time as their elephants and they grow up together.  Elephants live about as long as humans and the bond between them can every strong. 
      The Danes got to spend time with the elephants again and we hiked to see the Buddha footprint.  Fifty minutes scrambling through the jungle later we arrived at a clearing with several abandoned structures in it that had once been used for Buddhist monks to stay and pray.  Lah, our guide, chatted with us for a long time about different things in his country.  Weddings and monks were the focus, and he explained how the monks area becoming careful who they accept because many people become a monk for a few months because they want to learn English or study or because there is something going on at home and not because of a devotion to religion.  After some time he cried out that he had forgotten the tea, and pulled out two large thermoses and a half a dozen cups that he had lugged the whole way.
       A cup of tea later two men from the lodge arrived with a boat and we walked to the lake, stopping at the Buddha's footprint.  Under a wooden roof there was a large somewhat foot shaped depression in the ground.  Originally in the stone the edges had been covered in concrete to make it nicer and a lopsided gold Buddha placed on an altar next to it.
 

       Lunch was early and same same.  We spent some time before it in the small museum with posters telling about the differences between Asian and African elephants.  The boat came to take us to the road to meet a tuk tuk a little after noon and Lah hurried us away from our goodbyes with the elephants because 'The tuk tuk was waiting'.  It wasn't.  Afraid we would miss the bus, we tried to communicate to the boat driver to go back to the center and have Lah call and he may have been doing that when the tuk tuk arrived, fifteen minutes late.  We still made it in time and were able to get seats.  This time we could almost have each had our own row.  
       It was even dustier on our way back, and it didn't take long for my black shirt to become reddish brown and my seat to be covered in dirt thick enough for me to write in.  It was too bumpy to read and almost too bumpy to sleep and too noisy to listen to music and we couldn't have arrived soon enough.  In  celebration of the new year a few feet out of town a group of laughing girls threw buckets of water at the bus and with the open windows it was very startling, but probably the one and only highlight of the ride.

Arriving at the Conservation Center

     Based on what we learned at various hotels and travel agency, the local bus to Saiyabury leaves at seven or eight or nine.  Definitely.  Unless it leaves when it's full.  To be on the safe side, we planned to arrive at seven to make sure that we got seats.  The one thing everybody agreed on was that you couldn't buy tickets in advance because it was free seating.  (That wasn't true).
     When various factors outside of our control aligned to make us late, the bus was mostly full but we found two seats next to eachother in the way back and one nearby.  Too bad that while we were sitting there other people bought them.  Instead we joined the people sitting on plastic stools in the aisle.  Make it clear that there wasn't a backrest, at every turn the stool went sliding one way or another, add on a dozing French girl on either side perilously close to using one's shoulders as a pillow and a mini dust storm centered mostly on us aisle-ers and three hours later you'd have our busride.  At least the music wasn't too loud or obnoxious.
      The ferry across the swift river held vendors selling snacks.  By the time we reached land again bags of snacks were being passed around with complete disregard of who bought what and who knew whom.  A man laughingly offered me some roasted crickets and my dad tried some.  He says they were tasty, but I was too vegetarian to sample any.
 

       A tuk tuk was waiting for us and the three French girls who I sat near.  Though bumpy we were going to slow for much dust to assault us and the ride was fairly short. The boatride that followed was also pretty short, though fitting seven people plus luggage on a bought with three one-person benches was a feat.
       The lake we motored through was covered with water plants.
 

        I almost lost a flip flop in the mud when we disembarked but saved it just in time.  There were a couple of planks that we could step on and some dry patches but it was a bit of a scramble to the path.  The bungalows only housed maximum of two people but we were next too eachother. Sandwiches from a Scandinavian bakery as well as the last of the Siem Reap mustard made a delicious lunch and afterwards we had about an hour before we needed to do anything.
       After meeting up again in the dining area we got a tour of the complex before going down to the pavilion where the elephants were brought.  Introductions were first, but I can't remember any names other than Mae Bou Nam (19) and Mae Do (over 60).  'Mae' is an honorary term meaning 'mother'. The other elephants were 21 and 35, male and female respectively.
       Elephants are such large, beautiful creatures.  I'm afraid that pictures don't do them justice at all.
       The mahouts had them demonstrate the various ways the elephants could let us climb up to ride them, such as kneeling or lifting one knee to work as a step.  It seemed unkind.  My mother and I almost didn't ride but changed our minds at the last second and took our turn around the small loop. Elephants can drag very heavy things but cannot carry much weight on their backs.  One, or even two if they sit forwards, are comfortable for the elephant but howdas not so much.  Particularly if they hold two or more people.
         Here I rode sitting on Mae Do's neck, my legs tucked behind her ears and my hands on her head to steady myself.  Elephants have what is basically a ball-joint in their ankles and so are immensely stable, but the rise and fall of their shoulders makes it a bit scary.  No falls, but when I was concentrating on keeping my shoes from falling off and petting her head it felt a bit precarious.
 
    

                            

                              
 Once I had half-climbed, half-slithered from her back she joined the others by the benches to one side of the pavilion, asking for bananas.  We were each given a bunch to share among them and they went quickly.
 u
    What with their tough skin and coarse bristles elephants are not the cuddliest of animals but it means that they aren't hurt by thorns and branches when in the jungle.  After dinner (veggie options consisting of meatless meat options--that is, exactly what the other people ate and without the protein) we walked with Mae Bou Nam's mahout Pang over a couple of hills to where she pulled here chain from the bushes.  Practically, it makes sense to attach her to something during the night as it is a lot harder than one would think to spot a elephant in the trees and 300 meters is really long but it was depressing watching her pull her own chain towards her.  
    

Leaving Cambodia

    I decided that Angkor Wat needed its own post so this is a recap of what we did in Siem Reap both before and after that day.
     The day we arrived we didn't do anything other than swim and walk around a little bit. We didn't even go out to dinner, but just went to a minimarts to get some bread, cheese, and pickles.  For the first time in months the pickles were good and I OD-ed a little bit and had to drink a few bottles of water for the salt.  Breakfast was at our hotel and I didn't know that it was April Fool's Day until my parents convinced me that they were dragging me out to these temples more obscure than Angkor Wat and less touristed because to get there you needed to do a homestay and hike about seven kilometers each way.  I wouldn't put it past them, but I was NOT happy.
     April second my parents got our airplane tickets to Luang Prabang.  In the afternoon we took a tuk tuk to Artisans d'Angkor, a school teaching traditional crafts.  There was a large shop there so after we booked a tour of the factory we browsed a while.
       About forty five minutes before the bus left we went to a streetside cafe for lunch.  The food was good but the service excruciatingly slow.  Sitting through a brief downpour was pleasant but when our food arrived only ten minute before the bus left my unhungry dad went back to keep the bus from leaving without us.
      It only took about twenty minutes to get out of the city and to the factory, and there we only six other people on the bus.  First in the factory we were taken to see the mulberry bushes briefly and then to the silk worms.  They have a forty seven day life span, but eighty percent are killed for their silk before then.  The eighty percent have their silk spun into skeins of raw silk and some is respun into fine silk.  Strands from dozens of cocoons feed through a hand-cranked wooden machine and twist up to create one thread about four hundred meters long. 
     The thread is then washed because though it is naturally a beautiful yellow color that will wash out. Traditionally, Cambodian textiles have employed natural dyes. Red dye comes from  lac insect nests, blue dye from indigo, yellow and green dye from prohut bark, and black dye from ebony bark.     There are two main types of Cambodian weaving. The ikat technique, which produces patterned fabric, is quite complex. To create patterns, weavers tie and dye portions of weft yarn before weaving begins. Patterns are diverse and vary by region; common ones are lattice, stars, and spots.  I could find no websites that talk about this in great detail or I'd include a link.

                                

      A bit before the tour ended I started getting the standing-with-my-knees-locked low-blood-pressure fainty-feeling so when it concluded and there was a place to sit down in the store I gladly took advantage of it and held the backpack while my parents walked around.  Much of the items were the same as in the store in town but now I was less inclined to browse because, though I had known vaguely before, it didn't really hit home that the worms were killed to make the silk.
     For dinner my mom found a restaurant she really wanted to try that was another charity organization restaurant.  Meaning, it was a good cause and we were glad to support it but my scalding soup was spilled on my lap while being served and not the deliciousness we still aren't too disillusioned to hope for.
     The next day we went to Angkor Wat (see last post) and for dinner walked half a block down to Rosie's Guesthouse.  The portions were on the small side and the salad weird, but my jacket potatoes were good.  I find that it's easier to write about what is wrong with a meal than what is good with it and part of it may just be natural pessimism or that bad food sticks in the memory more than food that is good but not astounding or even that we've just had bad luck with restaurants but I am so sick of eating other people's unsatisfactory food.  Lucky for me my mom REALLY misses cooking and is making a list of all the stuff  she plans on making so for a long time we will be set and at least there will be the ingredients for me to whip up some good pasta... Or a salad.... Yum, salad....................
     The day after Angkor Wat we slept in a little before taking a tuk tuk to drop off some laundry and to bookstore and walking around from there.  We each got a book, and just in time because my kindle broke the same day.  It was either serendipitous or I jinxed something.  Unfortunately the crisis was diverted only temporarily because the Michael Conelly was gone in two days.  Of course this happens at the climax of my book!  I was so relieved when I found the kindle app, connected it to Amazon, and found that all my books were saved.
     We walked around for a while looking for a second bookstore but gave up when it wasn't where it was supposed to be and the direct sun and ninety-plus heat started really getting to us.  The power was out for a large section of town but we found an ice cream-based restaurant called the Blue Pumpkin with fantastic ice cream.
      On our way home we took a tuk tuk.  Despite planning on staying in for a couple of ors we got hungry and found a place that got amazing reviews called the Peace Cafe.  Do not go there.  Tis is not just me missing home food--the service was horrible (despite them being in a part of town with power!), the food utterly tasteless, and the flies awful.    
     Without a particular restaurant in mind after a lazy morning the next day we headed out on foot to a late lunch.  It was just as well I was the only hungry one because our attention was diverted by a movie theater.  Claiming to be the 'number one tourist attraction', somehow bypassing Angkor Wat, it was a genius idea.  Choose your own movie and get a private viewing room with a big couch against one wall and a ginormous screen onto which the movie was projected.  Also serving noodle soup for peckish people such as myself.
      From the list of fifty or so movies we chose Life of Pi and though the cinematography was beautiful and the movie well-cast I have to say that it didn't even begin to compare to the book.  The book seemed like such a vivid, slightly surreal but above all believable story of amazing survival with such huge ambiguity and slow revelation and this was... Pretty.  Really pretty, especially in the ocean-at-night scenes, and not so pretty in others and I'm glad I saw it but it lacked so much.
      Afterwards I wasn't hungry anymore but my parents were so we walked over to the alley where a bunch of restaurants are clustered.  We picked a vegetarian restaurant called Chamkar.  I sampled the dishes my parents ordered and the food was really, really good.
      In the morning the next day, which might have been Friday, I skyped first with one friend and then a different group of friends.  It was so good to see everybody and instead of making me melancholy I just got excited to be home.  
      My parents went out to do errands while I dealt with the picture formatting for Angkor and the after one last swim we left for the airport.  It was smile day and we were given palm sugar candy after breezing through security.
     While waiting a little over an hour for our plane to take off we found out that the airport had a Blue Pumpkin and we entertained ourselves with milkshakes.  It was my first time in a propeller plane but since we didn't fall out of the sky it was fairly anticlimactic.  In this case, that was a good thing.
     It was a smallish airplane, with only about thirty rows of four seats.  Eight of these seats were filled, two people a few rows behind us and two ahead.
     Leaving Cambodia was really sad but that kind of got pushed out of our minds when we land in Lao.  I say 'Lao' because that's what people here say.  It wasn't a long walk from the plane to the airport and it was super quick to get visas and grab our bags.  The Laotian visa is shiny and silver and pretty, much prettier than the Vietnamese one.
 
     A car from our hotel came and picked us up.  Luang Prabang is tiny!  The area where we are, a peninsula surrounded by rivers, is four streets wide exactly.
     Our first night here we learned how to say hello and thank you and set out to explore.  It was an outing of several hours, stopping at hotels to investigate moving, looking at menus, stopping in shops.  We finally ate at a guesthouse that I don't know the name of but that had many great veggie options.
       This morning my parents went on one more hotel-scouting expedition without me and then we all set out to explore.  After a while we stopped at a cafe for cold drinks before heading out for a little more meandering and lunch.
     Finding our way across one of the rivers on a bamboo bridge to Dyen Sabai was a feat of navigation but we made it and were glad in the end.  Sitting on cushions around a low tile table we tried the vegetarian fondue.  Laotian fondues are not cheesy, but instead are a cook-your-own-soup and fry-your-own tofu arrangement made with a bucket of embers and a metal burner/pot to put on it.
     A small store on our way back to the river caught our eye because of the kitten and puppy inside.  The cat was sweet and very vocal but the puppy was the star of the establishment.  Typically, she chewed on my arm but was exceedingly cuddly.  I also forgot what it was like to pet a dog distinctly more on the chubby side rather than the skin-and-bones one.
      Tomorrow we are leaving to spend a couple of days with the elephants.  I should be back within the week.

Day of Heat and Temples (In Mostly Pictures)

     
     As per the advice of a Croatian woman that we met on a day I have yet to write about, we went to the temples early and late.  By waking up at four thirty we made it to Angkor Wat as it was opening and joined the crowd gathering for the sunrise.  Because of the clouds we left before the sun was visible and evaded the throngs temporarily by going to Angkor Thom.  When we arrived there were two other people there.
     Instead of biking through the complex we hired a tuk tuk for the day.  A guide was also hired through the hotel but we had mixed feelings about that, as though he helped us figure  out where to go when and what everything was his accent was difficult to understand and there were points when we wanted to wander through the abandoned rooms rather than listen to a lecture about them.
                                     
     Various countries are assisting with the restoration of the sites and go about it in different ways.  France sorts through the daunting piles of rubble and fits the pieces back together like a puzzle while Japan carves completely new pieces that look like the originals in their original state.  I hope that they only do this in some place and leave others in their original state.
 
     To get to Angkor Thom we passed over a bridge lined with gods and demons playing tug-of-war, gods to the left and demons to the right.  The gate at the end was built with dozens of small chunks of carved rock fitted together and built in a way that seemed very insecure.

After our guide described the gallery of carvings we walked through the temple. The religious aspect of the buildings figured a large part in our day, but the details on the walls that really say that a human carved them hundreds of years ago were more interesting to me.  I know some people are really interested in the symbolism of the carvings but I was more intrigued by the stories carved in, like the man turning around and yelling at the woman whose turtle is biting him.

                                    
     At the second building in the complex there was a giant reclining Buddha built into the wall of the building and steep stairs that led to it.
      At the third there were more steep stairs, and a legend of a snake turning into a woman every evening.
      Our last stop there was at the Elephant Terrace, where the king would watch parades and games from.
     From there we got back in the tuk tuk and went to the library and university of Preah Khan.  Every few feet there is a doorway and lintel used to hold up the ceiling, and the walls are covered with holes that were used to hold up the jewel-studded copper that was looted in the fourteenth century by the Thai.  Every so often we would come across an irregular pedestal in the ground that had held a statue of a Buddha centuries until the same time the copper vanished.  The structure was very long, and to the side were stupas dedicated to generals.  The walls to the stupas were decorated with intricate carvings but in many places there were large chipped-away places where a Buddha was removed by King Jayavarmin the eighth, who converted the country back to Hinduism.  In the back of the complex there was a two-story building used to house the sacred sword and trees growing over a couple of the walls.
                                     
                                 
     By eight in the morning it was getting hot so by ten we were glad to be heading back to the hotel.  Our guide told us that his parents never took him to Angkor Wat and he eventually went with a friend while in secondary school.  Like so many people, he was good-naturedly bitter, remarking that he always knew he would be a guide.  He lives in Siem Reap, what else could he be?
     Our hotel serves a flexible breakfast that we ate when we got home before a quick swim and a long nap.  We met the tuk tuk outside the hotel at two.
      After driving for about ten minutes we heard a loud bang that signaled the popping of one of the back tires.  The driver drove back to trade out his vehicle but was back in less than ten minutes.
    The path to Ta Prohm was filled mostly with tourists leaving but that didn't mean that there weren't clusters of people taking hundreds of pictures and being in the way in many places.  Ta Prohm is notable for all the trees that have taken root on the walls and it was definitely surreal and beautiful.
                                  
                                
                                 
                               

    Finally we went to Angkor Wat.  Most people go to the temple in the morning because it's cooler than so we decided to go in the afternoon to get some space.  I don't know how the crowds compare but it was really hot and not hardly deserted.   The road we walked on to get to it had a few dozen whisker monkeys on it, the babies holding on to the mothers' bellies and the big males staring at us and being scary.
 
     The entrance we went through had a wooden built up to it not because the original stone stairs were too worn down to be safe but because the king would ride up and disembark from his elephant.  Through a passage filled with statues decapitated during the Khmer Rouge we reached a courtyard with a tall structure in the center.  The line was long and the stairs were steep so my mom opted to wander through the relatively empty rooms lower down while we went up.  From there we could see the entire complex and honestly were a bit relieved that it wasn't as huge as we feared.
                                                                            
                                     
 
                                   
                                
     When we came down we saw another long gallery of carvings before coming to a hall with several pools once filled with water and a surviving Buddha. We also saw an intact Vishnu statue that people had put incense in front of.
                                   
                                                                                     
  I don't recommend falling asleep in a tuk tuk.  My head kept snapping backwards but I couldn't stay awake long enough to get home.