Angkor, What!? - 3rd December 2007

Ok, this is what Cambodia is all about, temple ruins.  They are touted to have the best temple ruins in the world and I’d have to say that I’d be surprised to find out that wasn’t the case.  Got myself a 3 day pass for US$40 which is a bit steep around these parts, but hey, it’d be a bargain at twice the price.  I’m told that there are many times more tourists around now than even only 2 years ago - tourism is exploding here and as such I feel quite lucky that I’ve gotten here when I have.  Sure there were other tourists at all the temples I went to, sure there were lots of them in total.  But there were also lots of temples…so the tourists do get spread out somewhat.  I imagine that in a couple more years they’ll be overrun. At the moment I was able to get MOST of the shots I wanted to get without any people in by just sitting down and waiting…sooner or later the scene that I was shooting would be tourist free and I’d grab the shot and move on.  In the future this simply wont be possible, there’ll be too many folks running around to ever get any empty wide shots.

One thing that really surprised me was the level of access you get to them.  These are thousand (some of them) year old ruins, I’m sure their value is near limitless, yet aside from the odd roped off section or sign warning you out of a dangerous bit you can just wander all through them, wherever you like.  If something like this were in Aus I can imagine there being a set route that you walk through without any chance to deviate and with the greater part of it sectioned off.

Anyways I’ve taken an obscene amount of shots these past three days.  It will take a long time to crunch through them but here are a couple edits from the first part of the first day, expect many more temple shots to come: