When spending time at major sights around the world, the first day can seem like “Wow, amazing”. The second day is then “oh, this is quite interesting” and then the third can deteriorate into “Hmm, another lot of much the same” and then the whole experience can be dulled. So after having spent nearly a month in Asia, we plumped for just the one-day pass to tour the Angkor area north of Siem Reap, so that we could stick with just the “Wow” and avoid temple fatigue.
The hotel supplied us with a tuk-tuk driver and our own guide, Mos who was, and still needed to be, studying English. As tourists, we all want to know at least some of the details of what we are visiting, but it can be hard to fully enjoy a sight when your nose is constantly buried in a book attempting to extract all the information about where you are. Guides can fill in gaps with a bit of colour and insight, but sometimes it can feel like this gives the experience a time pressure. There can be problems if their English is hard to understand, and even when they are easy to understand you can feel like you’re suffering information overload. Sometimes, with no book and no guide, the silence that attaches itself to the place allows you to slow down and simply absorb your surroundings.
Mos took us to the more popular temples for in-depth tours and pointed out other smaller temples along the way. He was good company, took photos of us and knew when to leave us alone and when to help out. He also told us snatches of his life growing up in the Pol Pot era, and it certainly wasn’t a childhood we could imagine.
You can’t avoid the crowds. Tourism is to be dealt with in your own way and the memory of finding a beautiful sight somewhere in the world, and have no-one else there but you, is marvellous. But that now seems something that is well and truly fading in to the past. Angkor was crowded, very crowded, but it still had an aura, an atmosphere, a “wow” about it.
