inconsistent news from southeast asia

Alright, so i'm falling behind in the log again, torturing myself trying to figure out how to cover Angkor Wat. The asnwer, as usual, lies in doing a half-assed job of it. There is no way for me to really convey much of an impression of the scope of the area or what we saw in the course of three exhausting days. Furthermore, it's quite the photographic challenge to try and record any of the temples - you want to get the scope of them, but that's always bad news for a picture.

The first day of templing was December 29th, and, through a convuluted series of events, we ended up hiring a tuk-tuk driver. Naturally, he took us for as much as he possibly could. We are not fond of tuk-tuk drivers here. But we did get to see the far off temples of Banteay Srei and Banteay Samre, which would otherwise have been innacessible. Now, the deal was as follows: it was $10 for the day if we were only going to see the temples clustered togethre in fairly close areas. In order to get out to Banteay Srei, it was $17. Then, it turned out that that $17 only got us a half day... So we paid more... for less! We can laugh about it now, but at the time it was.. not so funny.

So, for the afternoon, we had him drop us off at Angkor Wat, which we walked around in an exhausted stupor. Yes, it's huge. Yes, it's impressive. No, I didn't take any decent pictures. Here's some mediocre ones!

We ended up walking the 6 km back home at the end of the day, rather than give another penny to evil tuk-tuk drivers. Sleep quickly followed.