Templed Out.

I have to begin this blog with last night's meal. It was absolutely wonderful. We had amok which is a local speciality of seafood cooked in a coconut. Other than my "O" pasta it's the best food I have tasted for yonks.

We were up at 4.30 again this morning . We had hired the taxi driver we had yesterday to be our driver for today. His english is not the most easily understood but is no worse than a lot of the call centre voices we hear at home. He picked us up at 5.10 so that we could see the sun rise over Ankar Wat. It was quite impressive but I suppose I was a bit disappointed. The sky this morning was not ablaze with reds and oranges. Sunrise over the Taj Mahal was much more impressive.

We spent a couple of hours exploring Ankar Wat then came back to the hotel for breakfast. Our driver picked us up again and took us to Ankar Thom. It is a buddhist temple as opposed to Ankar Wat which is Hindu. We had another couple of hours there which brought on a touch of Forbidden City syndrome ie. it's all very spectacular but there is so much of it that you begin to tun off. We did have an interesting experience there. It was bakingly hot and we were enjoying the breeze while walking in the shade of the trees. Quite unexpectedly there was a stronger burst of wind and the leaves on the trees started falling like snow. It really was a strange experience. I wish I could have captured it on the camcorder.

Our driver said there were another two temples we really should see but as we were paying the piper we opted to go back to the hotel for a rest during the heat of the day. What we in fact did was to go and murder a couple of beers.

He picked us up at 2.30 to take us to the floating village. We had read about it in the guide book so knew it was an expensive rip off but we still wanted to go. It was but we're glad we went. It is a whole village,complete with houses, a restaurant, fish farm, crocodile farm, church, school, shops and various other enterprises. The houses are made of wood and sit on bamboo rafts. They move them around according to the depth of water ie. in the dry season they have to move them further out into the lake. It was all really interesting.
5pm back at the hotel and time to chill out with a beer and write the blog. I plan to post it before we go out for the evening. Night market then dinner in a Khmer restaurant that gets good reviews in Lonely Planet. It is owned by a chef who lived in Paris for 31 years. Apparently his amok is to die for. Hope we dont need to go to such lengths.

This has been a lovely day.