After our breakfast and showers, we chatted with the hotel front desk to organize a tuk tuk for the day to take us to see the temples at and around Angkor Wat. As we were waiting for it to arrive, Nick and the hotel employee got into an interesting conversation about the Thailand-Cambodia conflict. We have now heard the “why” behind it from a young Thai guy and a young Cambodian guy, and they gave us completely different stories. There are three sides to every story…

We loaded up in the back of the tuk tuk and got on our way. It was a 15 minute ride to our first stop. These were the most iconic temples and what I think of when I think of Angkor Wat.

We began the walk towards them. After about 5 minutes we were sweating and Millie was complaining about the heat. It was about 90 degrees here today, and humid. This is Cambodia’s winter and the locals were all wearing long sleeves and sometimes even hats. I can’t imagine what summer must be like.

We walked around and explored the temples. Millie was over it before we had really started our day. She was in luck when we went to climb to the top and saw a sign that said kids under 12 weren’t allowed. We took turns sitting with her while the other climbed.

She drew on her drawing pad. We had just walked past some carvings and looked at them, and she drew them in her style from memory. As always, I was impressed.

From the top of the temple we could get a great view of the whole site.

We promised Millie a cold drink. She continued to whine as we were walking to it and asked to be carried. She came back to life a bit after she hydrated and ate some fruit.

We got back into our tuk tuk and rode to the large, central Bayon temple. We climbed through and explored through all the passageways. It was fun to get lost in the building and just go where we pleased. My favorite part was the carving on the exterior wall. It was so detailed.

We saw a bunch of monkeys and stopped to watch them for a while.

We walked and walked and explored and eventually met back up with our driver. He brought us to a lunch spot that clearly catered to tourists, which in this moment we didn’t mind at all. We ate some much needed lunch and then moved on to our final stop of the day, Ta Prohm Temple.

On our walk in we heard distant beautiful music. As we got closer and saw the band playing it, we realized that many of them were disabled in one way or another. Some were missing limbs, many were missing eyes. They had a sign up explaining that they had all been in landmine accidents, and now their job is to play music. It was a reminder of how affected this part of the world is by conflict. There were probably landmines exploding not too far away as we enjoyed the music.

There’s no easy way to transition back into our exploration after that thought. We continued onwards to the “tomb raider” temple. It had previously been abandoned and giant trees have started growing all over it. It was amazing to see the mix of manmade history and nature.

By this point we were all pretty wiped out and looking forward to cold showers. It was a lot of walking. We headed back to the tuk tuk and rode back to our hotel. Millie fell asleep on my lap, which has happened now in 100% of tuk tuks we’ve taken.

After we freshened up, we watched the sun go down from the roof and played a round of cards by the pool. We found a vegan restaurant a block away with great ratings. We all needed some vegetables and it was delicious. Millie ordered her one of her favorite meals, pasta with pesto, and ate the entire bowl. We came home, FaceTimed with Nick’s mom, and got to bed early.