Took a few photos as we head for the ever popular lotus lake where many photographers will take photos of AW with AW's image reflected on the lotus lake.Upon reaching the lotus lake on the left side of AW, a huge crowd had already gathered around the lake watching sunrise, Kester managed to chop a pretty good place for photo taking. As AW is currently under restoration, there was a huge green scaffold over the front part of AW, hence decide to make the photo sepia, pleasantly surprised that the effect turned out pretty good.
Next up, we started our temple visiting proper after breakfast with Angkor Thom. My god, another tourist flooded area. This is due to the fact that South gate has been the most extensively restored and most complete.
Angkor Thom is one of the largest Khmer cities founded by Jayavarman VII and remained as the capital until the 17th century. Accord to Rany, Jayavarman VII is the most influential and strongest ruler among all the rulers of Cambodia.
After passing the South gate, we next visited Elephant Terrance and Leper Kings Terrace, we can see Bas reliefs of hunting scenes with elepants and the 300m long Elephant terrance, was the foundation for royal reception pavilions.
We visited as well places like Preah Palily, Phimeanakas & Bapuon and next up, the famous Bayon.
This can be distinctively identified by the many faces statutes in these temple.
Rany managed to convince Kester to do a pose with one of the face. A kissing photo, which I politely rejected the offer as I done a similar pose in Taiwan.
I really like the faces in Bayon. Sun was pretty strong when we visited Bayon hence I had a hard time photographing Bayon, only managed to get a better few when we walked to back of Bayon where the sun was blocked by the tower.
That end our 2nd day exploration of Angkor Wat Park.
Afternoon, we had planned to visit Tonle Sap, a break from our temple exploration.
Tonle Sap is a good experience for me as this is the closet you can get to know the locals. It saddening to see such young souls are so money driven.
One such incident, will be this kid selling me mineral water for USD1, however, I dont have small change so turned to Kes to ask her pay first. My god, the kid sudden jet up the price to 2USD, we had no choice so we just give the kid 2USD.
2nd incident was when Kes wanted to take photo of our cute young boatman playing with the python, however the kid beside him suddenly snatch the python from the boy and showed 1 finger to my friend and said 1USD.
Guess the environment had cruelly taken their chance of leading a carefree, innocent childhood. For living, they were trained by their parents to earn money from tourists so as to feed the family.
With that, we ended our day exploring Siem Reap and find ourselves back in pub street for food. I had a chance to taste the beer of siem reap ~ angkor beer. Pretty light and refreshing I must say. Kester tried one sip and showed me a bitter face.
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