32 km

Today we first visited Banteay Kdei, built in the late 12th or early 13th century. This site has many similarities with and is considered a smaller version of Ta Prohm and Preah Khan. It was built by the same king, Jayavarman VII, who built the most cities, temples and monuments of any of the Khmer kings.

We decided to visit Ta Prohm again, because it is closest to how it would have looked a hundred years ago, and had many more wild corners for us to explore. We did discover, though, that they are doing a bit of archaeological digging and restoration to shore up some of the walls, but not much. On the way out, we saw one of the groups of traditional Khmer musicians playing music by the side of the path. They are usually mostly land-mine victims and make money by selling CDs and taking donations. We placed some money in their brass bowl and enjoyed the music. I was happy to see that then a few other tourists stopped taking video long enough to do the same, I was hoping they wouldn’t be pointing cameras at these men so long without doing so. One woman plopped herself down on the small platform, nearly landing on the lap of one musician, and sat there yapping at her friends about how to get a good picture. We cringed and moved on.

Our last stop was the huge area of the Royal Palace Group inside Angkor Thom. We saw the long and imposing Elephant Terrace, which ends near the Leper King Terrace. Behind them was the Royal Palace, which was used by several successive kings.

Moving toward Laos

We are now in the habit of getting up at about 4:30, soon maybe 4:00, so we can cycle in the early morning and hopefully finish for the day by noon or 1:00. Tomorrow we leave Siem Reap to head East, and in several days we will be in Laos. We may be off the radar for some time, but don’t worry. I’ll have way too much writing to post when we get back online!