Found her!

All of my worries with technology and finding someone in a strange city are now over. I’ve managed to find Ursi and so the adventure has now begun. She had managed to find a cafe with a generator that had WiFi and it turned out that we were just around the corner from each other all along. Luckily now the power is back all of the time so it makes things much easier to be able to meet up and arrange things. Like I said before, you don’t realise how much you rely on technology until it isn’t available for a while.

Yesterday morning we all met up crazily early to go to Angkor Wat to see the sun rise over the temple. Getting up at 4am to be somewhere by 5am is not something I have been used too for quite a while but I have to say it was quite a refreshing change. Even when we got there that early the place was still full of people since it is a popular thing to do so we will had to get to random places in order to get some decent pics.

The whole area of Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples is really beautiful and full on intricate stone carvings and towers. It was great to see it all as the sun was coming up and it was still quite cool as later in the day the temperature really started to rise.

After Angkor Wat we headed to Ta Prohm, another temple in same area which is famous for its use in the first Tomb Raider movie. This overgrown temple had started to be reclaimed by nature hundreds of years ago and now has huge trees growing through some of the buildings. It is quite awe inspiring to see this amazing construction and achievement of men be overpowered and overrun by power of nature. What makes it so amazing is the size of the trees. These are some of biggest trees I’ve ever seen growing straight out of the middle of the stone structure as if the building has given then even more power to climb higher.

After a new more hours of talking and taking pictures we were all starting to grow a little weary before heading to the last place on our route for the day, Prasat Bayon. I am really glad that we went around the Angkor Thom area the way that we did and ended up this one last as it was one of the nicest for me personally. This is the temple that mas many faces carved into the rocks and not much of it is damaged so you are able to see it in all of its glory. This was a nice end to the day and after that is was time to head back to our respective hotels to relax for while as we were all dead on our feet. It was only about 4.30pm by then but when you started the day 12 hours before it is long enough to be walking in the heat and looking at history.

Buying a new camera was definitely a good investment and the 300+ pics that I took are certainly testament to that. The issue that I have now though is taking the time to sort through all the pics to find the good ones. I’ve started to reduce the size of the ones that are not the best to let me get things backed up quicker and then and only kept the largest size of the best ones and still I have over 1GB of pics for the day! Guess I will have to spend a day sorting through things some time to put aside all of the best shots.

One of the best things I saw all day that I didn’t manage to get a pic of was a group of Monks taking selfies! It is crazy when technology has caught up with religion and suddenly you get Monks in Ray bans taking selfies on their iPhones… What has the world come to!

Today we are going to head to an artisan place where they make lots of the paintings and sculptures etc. and also head down to a silk farm to see how they harvest it all and make everything. Hopefully it is mainly inside as today is much clearer and so a lot hotter than it was yesterday. Can’t complain too much of the hot weather though as in 6 weeks I will be back in New Zealand shivering at the start of winter 🙂