Day 2

I would like to preface this by saying that I am by no means as good a
writer as Sonali, so please excuse that.
With that out of the way here we go.

Day 2 in Cambodia.

Waking up at 6:00am is much easier when your internal clock is still
adjusting its time zone. We decided that elephant rides were something
that needed to get done while we were here so we talked to our tour
guide, who has been amazing, and he set us up.
The elephants went around Bayon, one of the temples we saw yesterday.

After the elephants, we climbed one of the hills of Cambodia called
Kulen Hill. It was 1500m vertically to the location of the holy waters
there known as Kbal Spean . It was a great hike and a lot of the
natural rock formations were perfect for climbing. Many of the views
were spectacular and we were able to get some great photos which will
be uploaded soon, but due to über slow internet, we can only upload 3.
The top of the hill is called the valley of 1000 Lingas. The majority
of the carvings related to the Hindu god Shiva and despite having
water run over them for hundreds of years, were in surprisingly good
condition. We also found a waterfall.

After the climb down, we went to lunch at one of the near by
restaurants and someone took pictures of all of our food. Lunch was
great and after we saw our last temple, Bantarey Sri.

Bantarey Sri was by far the smallest of the temples that we saw but it
was nice because it seemed more practical than the rest. You can tell
this temple is not as well known as the rest due to its lack of a wiki
page but to give you the gist of what the pictures will eventually
show you, the temple was built to honor Shiva and was built before
Ankor Wat so it’s pretty impressive that it is still around, let alone
in the condition that it is in. Fun fact, you can tell it was built
before Ankor Wat by the number of pillars in the windows, 5 for
Bantarey Sri and 7 for Ankor Wat.

Tonight we are off to the night market and then the real part of our
trip begins, 6 hour bus ride down to Phenom Phen then 6 hour bus ride
to Campot.