Even the most off-road backpacker ends up at a tourist destination sometimes. For 24 hours in Siem Reap, we were full-on tourists: sensible shoes, cameras in hand, and herded from one site to the next. I didn’t mind this too much, because it was the Angkor temples and there’s a reason people crowd to see them. They are truly magnificent.

Five of us rent a tuk-tuk for a day. $15 for the driver to take us around the main circuit of temples, from sunrise to sunset. It was a good deal. Angkor has hundreds of temples that can take days and days to explore. For non-temple-aficionados, you can purchase a single-day pass and just focus on the big three: Angkor Wat, Bayon, and Ta Prohm. And so there we are, squeezed into a tuk-tuk at 5 am to beat the sunrise, about to embark on an exhaustingly long day of temple-hopping.

Angkor Wat is the most iconic of the Angkor temples, and all tuk-tuk drivers will take you there first to see the sunrise. Wiser travelers will tell you to save Angkor Wat for later because as nice as the sunrise may be, it’s not worth dealing with this:

To escape this scene, Arne and I decide to skip the sunrise and go directly into the temple while everyone else waits outside. Great decision! We get to roam around the near-empty hallways and courtyards, before they become inundated by the crowd. Note: To go into certain parts of the temples, including the top of Angkor Wat, you must wear clothing that covers knees and shoulders. Even as relics, these are still considered holy sites.

Angkor Wat is big and we spend so long exploring it that when we come out four hours later, our tuk-tuk driver is nowhere to be found. It wouldn’t be a big deal if we didn’t already pay him half the fare and leave a bag with a camera in the tuk-tuk. We spend a good hour searching the entire “tuk-tuk parking lot” in front of the temple, which is basically a huge un-shaded lot of dirt. It’s so hot that we can only walk around for 5-10 minutes at a time before having to reconvene in the shade. Eventually we resign to the fact that the driver (and the bag) are gone. We hire another tuk-tuk and make sure to be more careful about the terms this time: leave no possessions behind, no payment until the end of the day, and no ditching customers! Our new driver is a nice kid and even lets us take a picture of his ID number:

Bayon is my personal favorite of the temples. It’s not as grand as Angkor Wat, but it’s artistically stunning. Bayon is carved full of stone faces, which many say resemble Jayavarman VII, the Khmer king who built the temple. The amazing thing about visiting Angkor is you’re allowed seemingly unrestricted access to the sites. You can touch, crawl, and climb every nook and cranny of these centuries-old relics, and no one is there telling you not to. It’s incredible! Arne and I climb to the top of a window ledge and sit for a long time taking in this view:

Ta Prohm is one of our later stops of the day. It’s famously known as the “Tomb Raider Temple” where Lara Croft AKA Angelina Jolie shot those movie scenes. The temple is overrun with trees and other forms of nature taking its course. By this time it’s mid-afternoon, easily over 90 degrees, and we have been at it for eight hours. Angkor temple-hopping is not for the weak.

A few other notable moments of the day:

When we return to our hostel that evening, the owner informs us that our original driver came by and dropped off the bag with camera that we left on his tuk-tuk. Cambodia, you have restored my faith in people after the mess of Bangkok! We top off our day of temple-hopping with a night of bar-hopping on Pub Street (self-explanatory name). To give you an idea of how affordable (see: dirt cheap) SE Asia can be, we only patronize bars serving 50-cent draft beers. $0.75 or $1, you say? Nope, move on.

Finally at 4 am we collapse into bed, exhausted, accomplished, and templed-out. The next day, J and I hop on a bus to Koh Rong for a few days of much-needed beach time.

[Cambodia. March 30 – April 6, 2013]