Angkor Wat is pretty darn cool. Lots of temples, all very old and very magnificent, AND you get to indulge all your Lara Croft fantasies when you visit (amazing the numbers of tourists sporting little shorts, crop tops and a bloody great gun strapped to the thigh. Not such a good look on a middle aged man with a belly…..). So magnificent is it, in fact, that it’s one of our designated “so-good-its-worth-going-back-to” round the world sites – I’ve been there before, 10 years ago or such. We were also a little cheeky, sneaking in a side trip to Angkor Wat from Bangkok, where we had to go to get our visas for Myanmar / Burma without actually visiting the rest of Cambodia. We did think about the Killing Fields, which is an incredible but devastating place to visit – but decided that maybe it’s not a place to go twice in a lifetime less the post trauma counseling fees get too costly…..

And as James has mentioned, even better, we managed to coincide the trip with the time my Mum and Dad were there, without even mangling the itinerary too much. Hurrah!!

For those who haven’t been to Angkor, the main thing to note is that it’s MASSIVE. The most well known temple of the complex, Angkor Wat, is apparently the largest religious building in existence – and it’s one of several hundred of the damn things dotted around several square miles of pristine jungle (well, now pristine – it went through a period of slightly less than pristineness post Khmer Rouge, when the whole area was landmined. Added a bit of adventure to the temple hopping). They sell 3 day tickets and you kind of need that to get your way around a half decent selection of the major sites.

The other thing to note is that it’s hot as hell, almost always above 30 Celsius. And that you go stomping up and down all these steep staircases (the temples are primarily built along the Hindu mountain-temple model, so they’re very tall) in said heat which gets quite quickly quite knackering. It’s surprisingly hard work for…well, a holiday. It calls for a strategy involving intense prioritization of the best temples, and plenty of time out for a decent lunch and a refreshing coconut or two.

With this in mind, we designed our campaign. Day 1, an onslaught of the slightly lesser known temples: Ta Prohm (actually quite well known this one – it’s the Tomb Raider temple, the one with all the trees growing round, through and out of it), a sneak by Pre Rup to check out the lions, whistle past the water temple of Neak Pean before spending some time at Preah Khan (amazing – an almost matrix like structure of interweaving corridors and halls, all near deserted and there to be explored) before heading to Angkor Wat itself for sundown. Day 2: visiting the 2 most spectacular sites of Angkor Wat (you’ll know it if you see it) and the Bagan (James’ favourite, a quite spooky temple covered with giant stone smiley Buddhas). Day 3: an hour’s tuk-tuk ride out into the countryside (which was brilliant! Rice paddies a go-go) to Banteay Srei, a tiny outlying temple famous for the delicacy of its carving (of which there is LOTS). Angkor Wat lay defeated before us.

Favourite day? For me, probably day 1. The lesser known temples are usually very quiet and there’s precious few restrictions on where you wander, so you get to go exploring through these amazing ancient sites at will. Makes you feel a bit like an old time archaeologist, discovering the place for the first time. Despite the fact that this wasn’t actually the first time. And hopefully, not the last.