The trip was organised by Darter with focus on photography. Not my first trip with them so knew what kind of trip it would be. A nice group size with one organiser, one local agent for the whole trip with driver for the mini van, three of us and at every place a local guide.
This resulted in a lot of local knowledge and easy contact with the local people as the guides knew them very well. Also here everywhere good food opportunities.
We started in Siem Reap where you will find the famous Angkor Wat temple. This place is is well known for its sunrise. At least it must be as you see a large crowd waiting there at 5.30 or earlier too get a good place for the sunrise. Looking around I saw a huge amount of camera's and most of them not the really cheap ones. All waiting for the 6 o'clock sunrise. Unfortunately the clouds were not that friendly and kept away the sun until quite late. Still some nice shots of the temple against the back light.
We left the main temple and went to the backside to visit the Ta Prohm temple, an old temple that is going back to nature. It feels a little bit like the Asterix version with the copy of Rome in the forrest. Don't know the English title but in Dutch it is the "Romeinse lusthof". Also here you see that most of the buildings are captured by trees.
The religion is mainly a form of Buddhism that is having a lot of Hinduism influences that come from the early days when the area was ruled by "India". During this time Hinduism was the main religion and you still see a lot of religious habits coming from this time. One of them being the people that are praying and performing Puja kind of ceremonies. This takes place at for us sometimes strange places like here in one of the passages. Here a lady took care of it and "sold" the coloured pieces of cotton used as bracelets.
Had a steep staircase going up and we got a special lable before going up. Assume they didn't want to loose anybody.
There also a man was telling the future. For this you had three changes to find a future that would make you "happy". It was a set of cards that you would keep on your head with one hand. The other hand was used to put a ruler between the different pages. This marked the page with your future. Which would be opened and read by the man. In total three possibilities so be careful with number 2.