Cambodia

From Luang Prabang we took buses south. The first day to the backpacker hot spot of Vang Vieng, then to the capital of Vientiene where we caught a flight to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat.
After Luang Prabang the two Laos stops were uneventful. Vang Vieng has beautiful mountains surrounding it, but the town is not pretty and filled with tourists (like us). Vientiene has very little to recommend it, other than the food offered at the night market along the river.

The temples of Angkor are overwhelming - we spent one full afternoon at Angkor Wat, then two days exploring the other temples in the area. There are a lot of temples in various state of ruin (some people estimate the Angkor area had a million people at the time Angkor Wat was built). All amazing, with the vast quantities of stone and intricate carvings. After a while, however, it's all just too much to take in.

One of my favorite moments came on the Bayon, a large monument north of Angkor Wat. I was looking at a carving of a dancer, one of probably thousands of carved dancers just in the one temple. The dancer's dress had a repeating pattern, a mark suggesting a flower with four petals. It looked like the carver had a chisel tipped with the pattern, and he made them all with the petals aligned straight up and down and across.
Except one flower, tilted just off the axis. The one slight deviation made the carver much more real to me. I wondered if he'd hurried up to get on to the next dancer, or if the slight tilt was his way of sneaking in something to mark that carving as his.



The streets of Siem Reap are full of beggars and tuk-tuk drivers even more insistent than those in Bangkok. None of the drivers or children trying to sell you books or postcards take no for an answer, they just follow you asking you the same thing for half a block or until they see a new target.
More surprising were the amount of vendors selling food, drink and souvenirs outside all the temples, and the children at the entrance of all of them, selling books or postcards. Few of them follow you into the temples themselves, but it can be jarring to leave the calm of a 1,000-year old temple and suddenly have 5-10 kids run up to you, all asking you to buy.