The first thing we did on our first morning in Cambodia was switch hotels. Our first hotel had very nicely found us comparable rooms somewhere else, which meant that for the first time we would each have our own rooms and bathrooms. The very idea was so decadent!

Jacey picked us up at 9:00am and we drove our bags to the new hotel (where I insisted on seeing the rooms before paying. The rooms contained two beds, a desk, and TVs—so they seemed absolutely palatial to me after our last room, where we could barely move around the two giant bunks. And for $7 each, you really couldn’t go wrong.)

Once our things were safely locked up in our new quarters, Jacey drove us out of the city. Riding in a tuk-tuk is one of my new favorite things. You get a breeze, a terrific view, lots of honking (tuk-tuks, cars, and motorbikes are forever blasting the horn to warn each other that they are approaching—often from the wrong side). It’s just dangerous enough to be fun but not scary.

Our first stop was the ticket booths for Angkor Wat. It’s $20 for one day, or $40 for three. We got three-day passes. They take a digital photo of you, then immediately print a pass with your image on it, which you then have to present at every temple. It is so much more efficient than the border, it’s not even funny.

Once we were through the ticket booths, we drove along what looked like a large river but was actually the moat surrounding Angkor Wat (the temple; Angkor Wat is what the entire complex of temples (which Wikipedia tells me is the largest religious monument in the world) is collectively known as. It is also the name of the complex’s best-known and best-preserved temple. You might recognize it from the Cambodian flag.) As we rounded the bend in the moat and the temple came into view we all gasped. (I don’t gasp a lot, or say, “Wow!” when I look at things much, but over our three days at Angkor, all of us did, repeatedly.)

It seems like something out of another world (which, of course, it is). The scale is enormous, the design both completely alien and totally beautiful.

Isaure talked to some people and arranged for us to have a guide for the first temple. His name was Ra and he did an absolutely incredible job of rattling off information. He remembered so much data—years, size, the number of elephants involved in the construction. He showed us bullet holes in the walls from when the Vietnamese liberated the people who had been held prisoner at Angkor Wat during the reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge. He explained that there were 32 steps up to the temple symbolizing the 32 levels of Hindu hell (all the temples were originally Hindu; now they are used to worship Buddha. Khalid dryly remarked that he wonders how long it will be before the Buddhas have been replaced with the Virgin Mary.) There is also a tower with 37 steps, symbolizing the 37 levels of Hindu heaven. (We spent a lot of time at Angkor temples climbing stairways to heaven.) There were ancient swimming pools for Hindu purification rituals (alas, they are now empty. It was so hot that if they filled them, they could make a fortune charging admission.) Ra also pointed out holes in the stone that he said some Cambodians thought were from devils’ fingers but were actually used to help move the stone from the mountains to the site. He explained that for years no education was available under the Khmer Rouge.

When I asked Ra how he had learned all this he admitted that he had followed other tour guides repeatedly, sometimes recording what they said and studying it at home until he had memorized it. He wanted to be an officially certified guide, but the cost was $4500(!) so he had to settle for being unofficial. (He remarked sadly that nobody cared if you knew all the history—all you had to have was the money and you got a badge.) In the meantime, he was studying Spanish and Russian so he could give tours in more languages. He said you could make a lot of money from big Russian tour buses—as much as $180 a day when you take into account the kickbacks you get when you bring your tour bus to a restaurant or a store.

By this point we were hungry, so we headed in the direction of some booths inside the temple’s front garden (for lack of a better term—the area inside the front gate where there are two lily ponds. (One of which locals had waded into and were fishing with a net while we were there.)) As soon as we approached women came running out of the booths, asking us if we wanted to buy books, t-shirts, fruit, lunch—you name it. This was the one negative about Angkor—and it was never-ending. If you stood still long enough, you’d be surrounded by a crowd of people trying to sell you everything under the sun. And it was exhausting. Plus, a lot of them were children. The children sold everything from postcards (“ten for a dollar!”) to bracelets and books. The majority of them were about five or six. We bought postcards from one little girl because we really did need them. It was really hard to see children working—and hard to ignore them. But eventually we learned to do both. Especially after we read a brochure that said that giving them money only encouraged adults to exploit them and keep them out of school (which is free in Cambodia).

We agreed to eat lunch at a stall (all of the food places had tables lined up next to each other, and did the cooking behind a wall using battery power. At one point they unplugged a fan that was fanning us from the battery it was plugged into in order to use that battery to make my pineapple shake.)

After lunch we met up with Jacey and drove to the next temple. Along the way we drove down a long forest road where a large family of monkeys was congregating, much to the delight of tourists. (Over the next few days we learned that those monkeys are always there—why would they move when people feed them?)

I was afraid that after Angkor Wat the other temples would be a letdown but if anything the opposite was true. The smaller, emptier temples felt like our own discovery. Climbing in and out of doorways, up and down stairs, and wandering through forested grounds never got old.

But after two more temples we were exhausted. We gave in to the pleas of another aggressive woman and had more cold drinks in the shade (I was rapidly becoming addicted to pineapple shakes), but at that point we were getting tired and the sun looked like it was going to set soon. We asked Jacey where we should go watch the sun set and he told us Phnom Bakheng. We climbed the enormous hill in the boiling heat. The temple itself was the least interesting we had seen, and the crowds waiting to see the sun set made it a rather tiresome experience. But as we told each other, if we hadn’t done it, we would have wondered if we were missing out.

Jacey dropped us off at our hotel with plans to pick us up the following at 5:00am to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat (we feared it might be a repeat of the sunset, but it was definitely one of those experiences we felt we’d regret missing). After we had showered some of the red dust of the temples off, we decided to walk to a restaurant Isaure had read about in her guidebook. But we couldn’t find it, and you can only ignore men harassing you to ride in their tuk-tuks for so long when you are hungry. We ended up taking one to the center of town where we ended up eating at Khmer Kitchen, a Cambodian place also recommended in the guide. The restaurant was beautiful and the food was very good (as were the pineapple shakes!), but our meal was constantly interrupted by people trying to sell us things—or just flat-out begging. (We were sitting outside.) The most memorable was a little boy who said to Isaure, “You know how I can tell you’re American? Because you’re with Obama!” (He pointed to Khalid.) Then he said to me, “You know, if you had black skin you could be Michelle Obama.”

After dinner we walked down Pub Street. The restaurants and stores were very chic—very different from what we’d seen in Chiang Mai and Koh Chang. We got breakfast pastries for the following morning at Blue Pumpkin, another recommendation from Isaure’s book.

We went back to the hotel and I was so excited to finally sleep in my own room.

So of course I couldn’t sleep at all.

Every sound that I wouldn’t have worried about if I were with someone was magnified. (It didn’t help that the acoustics were such that it sounded as though everything happening outside the building were happening in my room. When they dumped water in the alley beside the hotel I was surprised to find that I wasn’t wet.) I finally got up at 3:30 and got dressed.

When we got to Angkor Wat it was still pitch black. (I could finally see the Big Dipper!) We used the flashlight on Isaure’s iPhone to cross the moat. According to Ra, half the bridge had been restored by the French in the ‘70s, but they stopped with the Americans began bombing Cambodia, so the other half was rough.

As soon as we entered the gate we were bombarded by the same women from the day before, this time trying to sell us coffee. Isaure spotted the same little girl we had bought the postcards from, up at 5:30am and already selling. We found spots near one of the lily ponds (that’s where the crowd is really thick, because you can see the sunset reflected in the pond). When the sun finally started to rise (which it seemed like it would never do) it was bedlam. We wondered if someone would fall into the pond. (I suggested that the whole thing would be more fun if each day a pond creature would rise from the depths and eat someone.) I decided that when I’m 90 I will come back, go over to the side of the pond that everyone is photographing and take off all my clothes.

After the sunrise (which none of us managed to get any good photos of), we continued our temple tour with more quiet, wooded ones. They were practically empty and I really, really enjoyed them. (Even though they were practically empty, they still had persistent vendors. When Isaure would tell someone that she already had the book he was trying to sell her, he would reply, “Same same but different!” Once she tried speaking to the vendor in French, and explained she would need the book in French. He replied in excellent French—and produced the book.

One of the temples I was most looking forward to was Ta Prohm (the one with the trees growing out of it that was featured in the movie Tomb Raider.) Unfortunately, large parts of it were being repaired and were therefore inaccessible, and the rest of it was crawling with so many tourists that it was rather unpleasant. If you go, I recommend going immediately after sunrise.

We took Jacey out to lunch at one of the restaurants inside Angkor. We asked him about himself–he said he’s not married because getting married costs $2000. (We got the impression that was some sort of dowry.) He owns his own moto but he has to rent the tuk-tuk attachment from a friend. He would like to buy his own but they are very expensive–a used one is $500.

At this point it was about 2:00pm, and since we’d been there since 5:00 we were ready for a nap. Jacey took us home and we passed out for a few hours.

Then it was time to figure out how we were going to get Phnom Penh, my next destination and Isaure and Khalid’s final. Our original plan had been to take a boat from Siem Reap, which sounded very picturesque, but Jacey told us that it was the dry season and boats probably weren’t running. We called the boat company and they confirmed it. After the long trip from Thailand Isaure and Khalid really weren’t looking forward to another bus trip (I didn’t care—I have a lot of long bus trips planned), so they hit upon the idea of taking a taxi. It would be faster without all the planned stops, and we could control the temperature, stop when we wanted, etc. We called Jacey and asked if he knew anyone who would do it and how much it would cost. He responded that he did and it would be $80. $26 per person didn’t seem so bad for such a long trip (it’s a 6-hour bus trip) so we agreed to leave the following afternoon.

We went out to dinner in Pub Street (once again, delicious), then walked over to the Night Market. The vendors there were just as pushy as at Angkor. Khalid got so impatient that he declared that he would buy something from the first person who left him alone. (It took a long time, but it did happen eventually.) Isaure found lots of things she liked, including a couple of opium pipes. She hopes U.S. customs will understand that they are purely for decoration.