Boy are you guys in luck! I just got back from three solid days in Angkor Wat today and I have about 500 plus photos to upload of every possible angle of every ancient temple I visited with out trusty guide Chiev! But not so luckily because Nancy is there for another couple of days so she still has the camera and memory card so you'll just have to wait a bit longer for those 500 photos. But any day now!

I will take a moment, however, to inform you that Angkor Wat is, as I suspected, worth the seven year wait -- i.e. I've been dying to go since 1999 when I opted out of traveling there with friends because I'd been trolling with them through Thailand for a month and a half or something and Megan needed her alone time. The next time I saw them they were slobbering about how amazing it was. Oops. Then about a year later I saw Wong Kar Wai's film "In the Mood for Love" which I cried through from beginning to end and in the end Tony Leung whispers his sad sad secret into a little hole in a wall of one of the temples in the Angkor Wat complex and covers it with mud for all eternity. How melodramatic can you get? About as melodramatic as I got when by Day Three of my trip there my guide and I had yet to locate the exact place of this scene -- I found out later he thought I wanted to see the temple where they filmed TOMB RAIDER!!! AAAHHH! I still tipped him though because he was a really interesting guy ... but more on that later.

Anyway, Angkor Wat is ... well first of all, "Angkor Wat" refers specifically to a particularly magnificent Hindu temple that dates from the early 12th century built by one of the Khmer kings who ruled Cambodia and Thailand at that time (all of it united under the Khmer Empire, which ended when the Siamese, or present day Thais, sacked its capitol city in the 15th century or some such century -- I am so bad with dates). Angkor the place, however, is an area near Siem Reap, Cambodia, featuring dozens of ancient temple complexes and royal palaces and cities that housed the Khmer Kings from the 9th century until the end of their reign 600 years later.

Okay that was slightly boring, at least it is until you GO there and everyone should. It's like the pyramids (not that I've been there but I've seen Indiana Jones and The Mummy so whatever) -- huge and incomprehensible and painfully beautiful. The Khmer Empire started out Hindu and slowly evolved into a Buddhist state with some violent and non-violent give and take along the way so there is a mish mash of religion and imagery going on, but all of it is unified by the ideas behind classical Khmer architecture. I'll stop there and wait until I add photos. All 500 of them. With captions of course. Long elaborate captions.