My advice to anyone planning a trip to Siem Reap is to get up early, catch the sunrise and see another three to four temples before it gets too unbearably hot. Also, we found that most of the bad weather we experienced rolled in during the afternoons, so we tried to work around that too. After a 4am wake up call, an afternoon nap was in order, but I woke up with just enough time to run across the street and rent a bike to go back for sunset. It was only about a 2-mile ride back, followed by a short hike and I caught a beautiful sunset before biking it back to town under star light.
On our last day, we didn’t get such an early start, and we were getting a little “templed out” truth be told. We saw a couple of temples in the morning, and we then opted for an afternoon boat ride to the floating village on Lake Tonle Sap. This was such a cool excursion. We took Cambodia’s equivalent of a longtail boat through flooded land, where only the tops of the trees stuck out through the water. The ride took about an hour, and eventually we came to a town, literally floating on water. All of the houses, schools and temples are built on stilts to account for the rising water levels during wet season. By the end of wet season, the lake ends up being about 5 meters deep.
We stopped in at someone’s home for lunch, and sampled more authentic Cambodian food, including freshly caught white fish from the lake. We watched as the vendors rode by in their boats, selling that days produce and as children played in the water, jumping from the steps of their home into the lake, and floating along in anything that would float, including buckets and garbage pail lids.
We made our way back to land and decided to try to make it to Angkor Wat in time for sunset. We couldn’t tell if we were going to get one or not because the sky was starting to look a little threatening, but as we got closer to the main entrance of the wat, a rainbow began to appear in the sky. Then, a few steps on, another rainbow appeared. How lucky were we? Not only did the rainstorm hold off, but we got not only one, but two rainbows, as well as an amazing sunset! What a way to end our tour of the Angkor Temple Circuit.