Siem Reap and Angkor Wat
We landed in Siem Reap late on Friday night (March 3) and were picked up by a tuk tuk sent by our hotel. Starving, we made our way to a student-run restaurant called "Love U" and had our first taste of Chicken Amok and Beef Lok Lak for dinner.
The next day, we wandered around downtown, checked out Pub St and the central market, and ate a great healthy lunch at Sister Srey.
After lunch, we went to the Angkor National Museum to get an overview of the history of the Angkor temple complex we were going to see the next day. The audio tour was long, but totally worth it, and the cafe had tasty juices made from fruits I'd never heard of.
Sunday morning we were picked up from our hotel in the pre-dawn darkness to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. Totally worth the lack of sleep.
After a guided tour through Angkor Wat, we hopped on mountain bikes and toured two other famous temples, Bayon and Ta Prohm, as well as a few other minor temples, all of which were very different but equally fascinating. The tour group we used was Grasshopper tours and overall the day was very well run - the group was small (only 6 of us), the tour guide was knowledgable, and they kept us mostly off the beaten path and away from a lot of the massive tour buses.
The night of our mountain biking tour, we ate at a delicious restaurant which, as luck would have it, gave me terrible food poisoning. Thankfully I was mostly recovered by morning, and after a day of bed rest was able to make it to "Phare", the Cambodian Circus. The performance was awesome - lots of acrobatics, a cool story, and live musicians.
