Angkor day 3

We purchased a three day pass to Angkor Archaeological Park and we had one final day with Socheat exploring the area. We decided to head a bit further out of Siem Reap (about 25 km) and check out Kbal Spean and Banteay Srei. Kbal Spean was said to have a nice waterfall and is also known as the river of a thousand lingas.

It took just under an hour to get out to Kbal Speen via tuk-tuk, but the drive through the countryside was nice. Once we arrived there was a 1.5km walk up to the river and waterfall. Compared to other walks we've done it wasn't bad, but it was still mostly uphill and pretty hot and humid.

Lingas are a hindu phallic symbol (for more accurate info: here).  Really there were just round half spheres carved in the rock.  A guy with an official looking uniform (could have been a park ranger) pointed out some more carvings and took us on a little tour of the river.  He pointed out some carvings we wouldn't have noticed without his help.

The waterfall wasn't anything spectacular, but there were quite a few Cambodians at the river and waterfall picnicking and cooling off. Just as I was about to take a few photos of the waterfall a guy walked up to the waterfall to cool off. I motioned to him asking if it was ok to take his photo and he very enthusiastically nodded and then posed several different ways. When I was done I thanked him and he once again, very enthusiastically, thanked me back.

After the river we headed to Banteay Srei. It was surprisingly crowded for being so far away from the main Angkor temples (a lot of organized tours go to this temple). It was a cool small temple that was the most intricately carved of any of the Angkor temples and is made of red sandstone. The thing that strikes me the most when seeing all of these enormous temples and intricate carvings is that all of these things were built and carved by actual, real life, people.

On the way home we stopped at Angkor Wat to see it in the daytime.  Even though it was raining, we spent an hour walking around the temple to see things we had missed last time. Back at the hostel we invited Fiona, an irish girl staying in our room, to dinner with us.  She invited another girl, and the four of us headed to "downtown" to eat.  We sat at a food stall on pub street and ate and chatted.  Afterwards we headed to the Angkor night market, which was much better than the night market we went to the night before.

Us with Socheat, our trusty tuk-tuk driver for three days