Yes, four exclamation points were necessary here. Buckle in because even as of writing this (in 2022, having now visited a total of 34 countries, this trip still ranks number 1 in my books!)

**BEEP, BEEP, BEEP**

The day started with the alarm (the type you program on the bedstand) sounding at 4am. “Becky do we really need to be there for sunrise? I’m soooo tired.” I think I mumbled something back like “I can’t get out of bed right now…” We both fell back to sleep. We awoke violently to a knock on the door. We both sat straight up looking at eachother realized what we had done! The good news was… we originally woke up at 4am South Korea time, which was 2am Cambodia time. NO WONDER we were exhausted. The good news is, now, even they we were late, we didn’t miss anything! We had to hurry but we could still make it for sunrise – thank goodness the front desk person came to wake us up!

We hired a tuk-tuk driver for the day. Basically it’s a moto with a cart to hold two people on the back of it. It was still pretty dark but the sky was starting to get bright, we still had time! We pulled into the ticket office to purchase our $20 each tickets (scam). They took our photo to print on them – we both realized how haggard we really were starting to look by that point of the trip.

Our tuk-tuk driver took us over to the Angkor Wat Temple. We were so excited UNTIL… we saw the HUNDREDS of other tourists there to also get the sunrise photo. Awesome… great… cool… 🙁 It was going to be like going through Disney World today. We heard people talking about waiting for sunrise, so I guess we didn’t miss it after all.

The sun started rrising and the scene was breathtaking. And then…. 5 minutes later…. Everyone packed up and walked back to their tour buses and left. Leslie and I looked at eachother. There were MAYBE 5 other souls around us. We had the place to ourselves! This was the most breathtaking experience roaming around the temples for the next few hours. Here we were, walking around these 900 year old temples with no limits and no people. It was as if time stood still here and all we could hear were the sounds of the forest.

With the tuk-tuk driver we didn’t have to carry our bags with us, so we just took our passports and money and left the bag of clothes and souvenirs in the tuk tuk. We pulled up to one of the temples and Leslie was so excited because we saw these little monkeys. We had barely pulled to a stop to take a picture when a bunch of them came to ‘greet us’ on the tuk-tuk. Before I knew it, there was a monkey on my shoulders, and one on my lap. How cool! “Take a picture!” I yelled towards Leslie who was starting to freak out. One of the monkeys bit me, and that’s about the time I grabbed it’s little face and chucked it off me. Another monkey stole my water bottle and ran off. Luckily the bite didn’t break the skin *twitch, twitch*

We walked all through the temples. Climbed inside, ontop, around. We walked into a place where time literally was standing still. We went to the area that Tomb Raider was filmed, you could recognize it instantly. It even had the same white butterflies flying around when we walked through there. Remember that scene where she’s shooting that stone guy, and then the head turns around… we saw that guy. The all seeing eye was all over the temples. And I’d like to say that even though the stone monkey’s didn’t come alive, I related to that scene after my monkey attack in the tuk-tuk.

At this point it was probably about 1030 and we were exhausted, the sun was already stifling. We decided to roam where there was more tree covering. There was this one temple in particular which was really cool. There were huge trees growing inside, ontop, and all around it. The roots were huge. Walking back from the temples we were bombarded by these little girls asking for money. It’s no wonder Angelina Jolie came back with a child after her time here. I’ve wanted to adopt every single child I’ve seen so far, it’s heartbreaking.