Today was a day of luxury for me, no push bike but a hotel car with driver & an English speaking guide all to myself for the day. First we joined the thronging masses, more like Disneyland than an historic site, around the inner set of temples at Angkor Thon, climbing to the heady heights of Baphuon (whilst the guide rested at it’s base) then on to to the temple apparently made famous in the film Tomb Raider, Ta Prohm. We stopped for lunch at the very expensive and not very impressive Triple K restaurant ($4 for a coconut!). then after lunch it was a walk around the legendary Anghor Wat. Since it was still early I cajoled the pair into taking me down to Lake Sap to see the Vietnamese floating village with its tank of crocodiles & other emporia. On the way the guide wanted to show me his favourite silk shop, but silk at $45 a metre I quickly walked out.
On our return we got talking about massages & that everywhere so far the word massage equalled sex 🙁 He explained that wasn’t the case with a traditional Khmer massage so I ended up having a two hour prodding, pounding twisting, stretching session for $25 at Siem Reap Khmer Massage, more like a Daphne Pilate’s workout than one of Sally’s relaxing ones. Will be interesting to see if my heel is any different tomorrow, she certainly found the pain point in it!
A pretty full on day, a lot more expensive than my regular days. I’m not sure if the extra cost gains a lot more value & in fact I enjoyed my solo trip to Koh Ker just as much. What would be good is a trip with someone with a lot more knowledge especially why did they move from Hinduism to Buddhism. Speaking to the managers tonight & reading Wikipedia I managed to learn a bit more.
a couple of hundred photos are here 🙂 as an experiment I’ve added them to Flickr here using the F-Stop uploader. Terribly slow as I guess it’s uploading the full file size images 🙁
Glad you had a good day …hope your heel mends as I am itching to go walking with you 🙂
Will be interesting to go walking and at what distances it kicks in again. Will go for loads of Thai foot massages & beach walking To free of the muscle
This is an amazing day Geoff, I have a friend who lives in Italy only left there last week 🙂