Bicycling around Angkor Wat

From the 9th to the 15th century, the temple-city of Angkor Wat was the center of the largest pre-industrial empire in the world. At the height of the Khmer Empire, Angkor Wat and its surrounding area had a population of over one million people, with a w. By comparison, the capital city of the Aztec empire had a population between 200,000 and 700,000. The empire's successive Hindu and Buddhist kings built many elaborately carved sandstone temples in the area just north of Siem Reap.

Since the closest temples are about 6 miles outside the city, most tourists hire one of the city's many eager motorized tuk-tuk drivers ($8 a day) to drive them between the various temple sites. Since we like to bicycle so much, we decided it would be more fun to have a more independent ramble through the surrounding countryside.

Smiley Guesthouse was happy to rent us some dilapidated (but quite serviceable) Chinese bicycles:

Here we are biking along the river that leads out of the city. (Since I'm the only one who can take the action-biking shots without crashing, they're all of Jen--which works out well as she is the more photogenic; a nice division of labor).


Here's a map that gives a pretty clear picture of many of the temples in relation to the city. Siem Reap (the city) is the small yellow blotch slightly below the center of the map. The large areas that look like city are actually the temple ruins (as are many of the smaller dots scattered around the map's borders).


We have seen many amazing uses for motorcycles while in Asia, but I particularly liked their use as pig-transport (spotted as we headed out of the city).


One of the nice parts about being on a bicycle is that we could stop and investigate a lot of the smaller temple sites that no one else (seemingly) visits. Here I am next to one of the less-used gates to a larger temple site. Unlike the main gates which were reliably mobbed with people, there was absolutely no one for many of the interesting places we visited.


Further along the road we found this interesting temple--again, completely without other people. (I really liked the guard-lion statue).



Since there was no one around, and no signs instructing me not to, I decided to climb to the top:


There's Jen!


Next up: The major temple sites.