Cambodia (1- 3 Dec 2014)

The next few weeks posts won't, for once, be about a bike trip. More of that is coming soon but in the meantime I'm going to use this blog as a place to record other travels.

Years of living in Australia but mostly holidaying in Europe has always let me feeling slightly guilty that I'm not visiting my own backyard of Asia more frequently - in fact my only real trip there was in 1983 on my way to Australia. So I've vowed to travel there more often in the next few years and this is the first step - three weeks split equally between Cambodia and Bali.

December the first saw Megan and I step onto a plane at Sydney and less than 24 hours later, after a brief overnight in Kuala Lumpur, arrive in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Why Siem Reap? Well its the town that sits beside Angkor Wat (and as I soon discovered many other equally, but differently spectacular temples), somewhere I've wanted to visit for many years. Megan has been here before but for me a complete new experience. We spent our first day in town doing the temples; up early to see sunrise at Angkor Wat then on to some of the other key ones. The scale of the place is what blows you away. Angkor Wat is supposedly the largest individual religious building in the world, and it's just one of many other huge structures- all superbly crafted out of stone; different to the European cathedrals but equally stunning. When you start reading about Khmer history you realize just what a limited view of the world we learn at school - in the twelve centuary they had a city of a million people when the population of London was just fifty thousand. Anyway here are a few photos just to whet your appetite.