Thailand or bust

Well ladies and gents

I write from bangkok after a few beers and four days in the very beautiful and very different cambodia. Today we arrived back afeter flying for forty five minutes into bangkok. The last three days of tourism have taken us to the region called Angkor which around the period of the norman conquest ( for the ignorant around the 1000/1100 ) dominated most of thialand, cambodia, loas and vietnam and angkor was its capital. To give you an idea of the imense scale of the area we hav visted the whole complex housed over a million pepole with around three hundred temples and a huge city . The main temple called angkor wat spans todat an area aboue 4 sq km the whole site is an Unesco listed monument and simply put it is breath taking total area about 300 sq km riddled with canals and 300 temples in its hey day! . First day we spent around  Angkor wat the main temple bulit by the first of the khemer kings it is surrounded by a moat as wide as the river thames and is a complex of surrounding walls andd 3 inner terraces' the highest of the watts reaching to well over 200/ 300 ft in hieght. It housed 6 imense libaries and has so around 54 towers all representing the regional areas of the empire all about the size of the UK. simply put it so amazing that i have honestly never seen anything to liken it in my life! The architecture is very Mayan and makes you wonder how interlinked these ancient civilisations were. Then you move on the 20 or so other imense temples we visited all different all in the own right the size of a football stadium ranging from the serreen beautiful, the simply huge structure to the the temple where Tomb Raider was shot. This was a personal favourite of both of us and we spent at least 2 hours exploring climbing , gawking at tree and simply just pretending we were Indiana Jones out to find treasure around the next corner simply brilliant. Scott the tree here are magnificent you should come for that alone. We also did two sunsets at the ruins and all memories I can never forget.

On Cambodia a lovely but sad place the people are friendly but around the area we were so westernised ie focused on money . out of all of this we found a lovely guy to drive us around for three days , the children who swarm around the ruins hassle all the time but they are to be forgiven . Many orphans from the Pol Pot period its heart rendering everyone has a story to tell . Until recently the area had big problems with land mines and even  now children suffer from the threats of Desease so badly it breaks your heart but also fills you with admiration. The place is also home to the really seedy side with child prostitution rife and many children seeeking refuge in the ruins of Angkor to be safe from the preying bastards from the west who do come here! all in all a moving experince and somewhere you have to visit even if its just to support a country we bombed and now need the tourist dollar to help recover. Simply put the high light of a great holiday and a place to inpsire the heart and soul now I',m going to find paul to toast the memory of it !

Charles