Siem Reap/Angkor Wat (1st half) 19/01/23

As most people will know - well almost anybody that's contemplated visiting any of those 'bucket list' destinations - Angkor Wat is right up there near the top of the list.
And, well...
The superlatives are about to flow.
It's big, damned big. No, it's huge. The kind of gargantuan, mind-numbing vastness that it's actually impossible on the ground to get a fix on how far each component bit, each related temple complex, is from the next one. With your ticket (that gets checked by sleepy staff in numerous places a round the complex) you can avail yourself of a map.
Well, it helped me a little bit, but didn't prevent me from walking far, far too far. Did I say this place was big?
Eventutally, I had to bite the bullet and hire a tuk-tuk driver to get me around the last few temples and back to my hotel in Siem Reap city.
Speaking of which; despite being Cambodia's 2nd largest city, Siem Reap seems only to exist as a 'feeder city' for Angkor Wat. I can't for the life in me identify what else it's for. There doesn't seem to be much. industry, a little commerce obviously, but it's mainly tourism-related. It's a dull place, but it doesn't need to bed, I left my hotel early (as the guidebooks tell you) and negotiated a price with a tuk-tuk driver to take me to the ticket office, and then the main entrance to the Angkor Wat complex. It looked vast and forbidding from the front door.
(How the hell did the people discovering it all get their heads around how much there was hiding in the jungle for all these hundreds of years?)
The Angkor Wat temple is actually the smaller of the two main temple complexes - and it's gigantic. The square 'moat' around the perimeter must be 400-500 yards across, and is like a shipping canal bordered by banks made from 1000s of huge stones.
I was pretty pooped working my way through Angkor Wat, and walking the perimeter. Stupidly, I thought I'd taken a clever route and found my way into the largest temple complex, Phnom Bakheng. Not a bit of it. I was (probably literally) miles away.
Therefore, common sense prevailed for once, persuading me (and my aching back telling me) to get a tuk-tuk for the rest of the morning/day.
Hell; the place just seemed to get bigger. You cannot see the ends. Long straight roads lead off through what used to be impenetrable jungle and now looks like parkland. I was cream crackers from occasionally jumping off the tuk-tuk to snap yet another crumbling old edifice (insert self joke here).
Angkor Wat is described as the 8th wonder of the world, and it's justified.
It's absolutely, definitely, one of the handful of most extraordinary places I have ever been. It defies simple and glib description.
I hope the photos [*restricted to two halves of 10 each by the site] do it justice. which are in chronological order as I made my way around - as far as I can remember.Read more