Temples, tourists and pint-sized salesmen

We're taking a little side trip to Cambodia to see the ancient temple ruins around Siem Reap. We met up with Joe again and also Renee's friend's Anna and Chris, more McMurdites, for a few days of touring. The most famous site is Angkor Wat, of course, the 12th century temple that is the crown jewel of the area.

But there are so many historic sites to see around here so we hired a guide and driver for 3 days to do the grand tour. Unfortunately, our visit is coinciding with some Asian expo and photography festival so there are even more people swarming the temples than usual, making it difficult to get photos without a hundred Japanese or Koreans posing in front of every object.

Here a few mostly tourist-free shots:

Bayon Temple














Ta Prohm, aka the Tomb Raider temple.


Non-tourists at Angkor Wat


One of the things that you must endure here as a tourist is the unrelenting assault by locals trying to sell you something. And to make things worse, many of them are little kids who are deadly persistant if you make eye contact with them. One clever strategy that I discovered to get rid of pesky kids shouting "Lady you buy! One dolla! Very cheap!"at you, is to point to someone else, like Renee, and say "That lady will buy some!"

But sometimes the numbers are just overwhelming. We stopped in a village so that I could jump out and snap a couple of shots and immediately our van was mobbed. I was watching the fun, fending off my own salesmen while the others still inside the van were probably cursing me.