Cambodia Day 5: Final Day at the Kingdom of Angkor

Yup, it's our final day at the Angkor empire, our passes will expire after today. We woke up at 4:30 am for our last sunrise session and we had decided to spend it at Angkor Wat again. There was more mist/fog than the first day and it was less crowded with tourists. We walked through the darkness in Angkor Wat for the second time, with my dear hubby limping a little from yesterday's sprain.

We finished around 8:00 am and went for breakfast. Uncle Lee dropped his glasses on the ground and they broke, so we went back to the hotel to get his spare. While waiting for Uncle Lee, we discovered that our guest house served food and drinks, and cheap too! Hahaha...we thought we were smart... looking around everywhere but our guest house for cheaper meals.

Our next destination, Ta Prohm, the site where Tomb Raider movie was shot. Ta Prohm is an abandoned temple that was discovered in the midst of the jungle. Surrounded by endless groups of tourists, there lies piles of ancient ruins with gigantic tree roots covering from roof to the grounds of the temple. Amongst the heaps of stones seen in the courtyards and around the galleries of the temple, one still finds beautifully sculpted devatas on the wall panels.

It was quite difficult to photograph the many tree-covering sites without wanting any tourists to appear in our photographs. This place was really packed with tourists who came in bus loads, led by tour guides who explained historical events in different languages, I heard English, Korean, Japanese and Mandarin. The heat that afternoon was rather unbearable, the light-coloured gigantic trees reflected more light and made the place crazy hot.

We returned to our guest house for lunch, took a short rest and recharged our batteries. All I remembered was that it took ages to serve drinks (the fruit shakes were good though) and lunch for all eight of us, cutting into our nap time.

We left the guest house at 4:00 pm, dropped KK off at the balloon field and headed for Tammanon. Unfortunately, we never got there because we had a little "detour". Our driver returned to pick his "sir" up and drove us to Ta Keo for our sunset shots. Not all of us climbed up to the top, except KK.

Ta Keo looked like an enormous stone monument with barely any carvings on its walls, come to think of it, I don't remember seeing any. History has it that the temple was struck by lightning which was interpreted as bad omen and therefore abandoned uncompleted. The steps were the usual very steep and narrow ones, we climbed up half way (the sunset scenery wasn't that fantastic anyway) while Uncle Lee decided to stay on ground. You didn't miss much, Uncle Lee!

Dinner wasn't as good as the two previous nights as we decided to try out a different shop, but it was cheap, so nothing much to complain about. After dinner, we went to Angkor Market which sold liquor and cigarettes cheap, much cheaper than duty-free shops at the airport. With so frequent use of this word "cheap", it wasn't a surprise that our driver learnt a new vocab - "cheap-cheap".

We returned to our guest house and had fruit shakes, and also ordered breakfast for the next morning. Oh and the banana shake was so delicious...