Day 2

It's Day 2 of my Angkor Wat and Siem Reap journey. After a crazy fun night before that ended at 8AM. I found myself up at 3AM in preparation, and also overexcitement, for our visit to Angkor Wat. Our tour starts at 4:30AM, so I went out on the streets to find some good hangover food which was when I came across this glorious dish.

The Beef Noodle Soup here is AMAZING. It's so simple, so cheap, yet one of the best things I've ever eaten. I love my Malaysian food, but this could compete with it anytime. This also became like 70% of my meals while I was here in Siem Reap.

Angkor Wat, here we come!

At 4:30AM, my friends were up, and we got on our van and headed straight to Angkor Wat to see the sunrise!! Or so we thought...

For anyone planning to go to Angkor Wat in the future, BE SURE TO PICK UP YOUR ANGKOR PASS AT LEAST THE DAY BEFORE, or at least when its not on peak hour. With all our excitement, we made an unexpected turning just before getting on the road to Angkor. We ended up in a bureaucratic building where we had to line up for almost an hour to collect our pass. It was not a fast process at all...

Sunset in Angkor Wat

When we've finally reached Angkor Wat. It was almost pitch black darkness and we were dropped by the driver by a moat with a beautiful bridge. There, we hired a guide - which I would highly recommended - for only USD$20. For all you history buffs on a budget, the guide can tell you all the history you want to know about the whole Angkor complex, so you only need to hire it once at the Angkor Wat temple. No need to get one for the rest of the sites.

The guide brought us to the perfect spot to take the photo. These are some that I took. We stood there for about 20minutes as we experienced the shade of colors behind the structure, from blue to purple to pink to orange.

The perfect spot where the the lake reflects the structure like a mirror

Of course, many people were squeezing for the spot too

The History of Angkor Wat

The guide we got was really worth the USD$20, you could see his pride in the monument as he told us the history of Angkor Wat and insisted on helping us take all our photos to the point of perfectionism. At some point we had to stand and pose for 10 minutes until he got the perfect angle.

What many people know as Angkor Wat is actually not the whole complex. The whole complex is only Angkor. Wat actually just means temple and refers to that particular structure which is the biggest in the whole complex. It was initially built as a Hindu temple to Vishnu in the early 12th century, but transformed into a Buddhist temple in the late 12th century.

According to our guide, it only took them 37 years to build the whole complex as Angkor's 1,000,000+ population were fully dedicated to its construction. The structures are so well-preserved that the intricate carvings could still be seen.

The carving shows Rama, the 7th incarnation of Vishnu, together with Hanuman doing battle..

..with this guy, Ravana

Instead of boring you with more history, here are the rest of the pictures we took from Angkor Wat and the other temples we visited.

It took us a total of 12 hours and 16km of walking to visit 9 temples out of the many temples.

My most favourite picture. The king's private pool

My second most favourite picture. I was testing how well the Pixel 2 takes photos in the dark - fucking well