Saturday, 6 June 2009

Day 2...Smaller temples of Roluos and the Jungle Temple!

We decided the best way to tackle seeing the temples was to start small and work our way up to the bigger ones and then see the far away ones later. I reckon it was the best way as they kinda just got better and better!

So the first ones are the Roluos temples in order...Preah Ko, Bakong and Lolei. Then went back in to the main temple complex and visited the smaller temples around Angkor Thom including the Jungle temple Ta Prohm, which has been over run by the jungle around it. Preah Ko was being renovated beautifully...













And then down the road was the large and beautiful ( one of our favourites)Bakong.



























Lo Lei was the less well preserved brother of Preah Ko, but was a stunning sight none the less !





















Ta Prohm Is one of our top temples the grounds around it were huge and the temples were literally being eaten up! Film directors have used the sight in loads of movies like tomb raider and you can see why !









Angkor temples Day 1

So...the temples...

There are countless stories to go with the pics of all the temples but it will take way too long to go through them all. Basically, in the days of the Angkorian rule over Cambodia, each King took on a tradition of building his own temple(s!). This has left the nation with a vast site just outside Siam Reap which is now home to hundreds of temples all of differing size, grandure and style. The area is known as Angkor with the most well known...Angkor Wat! We took 3 (long) days exploring these and only just managed to cover all of the main ones. We will post up the pics in the order of the temples and we'll TRY and tell you what they were called...maybe!! We'll start a new thread for each day, so here goes...
This is the evening we picked up our tickets and tried to get in a sunset. The weather was having none of it and decided to throw a major storm at us instead. We were not that fussed as we think it made for some fairly dramatic photos!! The mountain is home to the first temple we saw...Phnom Bakheng.








This last one is a sneek preview of a view over Angkor Wat. We will get to the proper pics of that one later. For referance, google or google earth Angkor Wat to get some idea of the sheer size of what we're looking at. It's massive!!!