Wednesday's Anchovies

After a memorable and physically-drained visit to The Great Wall of China, we planned for something more relaxing on the next day. Today we are going to Lama Temple, or being known as YongHe Temple ( 雍和宫). YongHe Temple, symbolized a palace of peace and harmony. This is a Tibetan Buddhism temple which is well-known with its Han Chinese and Tibetan styles artwork. Upon reaching the main entrance, few signboards can be seen mentioning some rules to be followed in the temple, to show your respect :) By the way, incense sticks would be provided for free in the temple, visitors are not allowed to bring in their own incense sticks. There are a lot of stalls or shops selling stuff for praying around the main entrance, just ignore them LOL. This is quite funny, a signboard built to advise visitor not to being cheated by fortune teller LOL. At the main entrance. Incense sticks provided by the temple. YongHe Temple gained a Guinness Book of Records in ye...

So here come the third day of our 3-day pass and we chose to spend the day at Angkor Wat :) Normally Angkor Wat is the first temple to visit but we made it the last temple to visit LOL :P Reason behind is we chose to cycling on the first day ... and since we are not sure with the road condition and direction as well, we decided to depart when the sky turned bright. That's why we skipped Angkor Wat on first day, as we would like to catch the priceless sunrise :) We are clear with the road condition now, so now is the time for us to wake up super early in the morning and cycled to Angkor Wat in dark :P  Although the sky still dark, but roads are busy with cars and tuk-tuk sending people to Angkor Wat! The crowd when we reached.... luckily we managed to find a good spot to sit down and wait for the sunrise. The sunrise :) One of the must see sunrise in the world :)  Totally worth it, to wake up so early in the morning and cycle against the chill bree...

After one day of cycling tour around Angkor Wat, we decided to rest our legs and go for tuk-tuk service during our second day of temple hopping tour :P  We are travelling away from town this time, around 50km away from town centre! Kbal Spean, well-known as "River with thousands lingas" where there are cravings on the river bank and beds!  On the tuk-tuk :) From city centre, we passed by villages, go into jungles, before we got to breathe in air from Kbal Spean :P Hello buffaloes!  Lovely blue sky! We had good weather that day, best for hiking! We had to complete a 1500m jungle walk before we got to see the amazing "River of thousands lingas". Oh ya, there is a mini waterfall in the jungle too! So it is better to bring along your swimsuit if you would like to dip into the refreshing cold water after the hike! After around 1.5hours of tuk-tuk journey, we reached the trail entrance!  Tips: There is a public toilet at the trail entr...

Refer to Part 1 of our cycling tour around Angkor Wat HERE . After lunch, we are fully charged again and continued our cycling tour again :) Next, we are passing through Victory Gate. Victory Gate looked similar to South Gate, but here is very much less crowded compared to South Gate. Thus, a good place for photo shooting :) Cycling towards Victory Gate. Our bikes in front of Victory Gate :) After awhile passing through Victory Gate, we reached Ta Keo :)  Ta Keo, this temple gained its popularity because of its bare stone. Structure of this temple was completed but not cravings. Unlike other temples, cravings on Ta Keo was not was not being conducted or not completed. We reached Ta Keo in the afternoon, hottest period! The stones. Ta Keo, a temple-mountain. After leaving Ta Keo, we continued our way to Ta Prohm. There is rock block along the road indicating distance to the next temple. This is a good way for us to know that we are on ...

We decided to rent a bicyle and tour around Angkor Wat after having a short chat with a pair of couples from Germany we met at Phnom Bakheng the day before. They told us "it is manageable to cover certain temples of small circuit as well as grand circuit in a day by bike!". This really motivated us and thus, here we are on our bikes :P We rented 2 city bike at 3 USD each from our hotel, you can get it cheaper out there but they might want to hold your passport until you returned the bike. For mountain bike, rental is around 5 USD. We had 3-day pass and our leisure plan was: i) Day 1 - cycling around temples in small circuit. ii) Day 2 - Kbal Spean, Banteay Srei and Banteay Samre by tuk-tuk. iii) Day 3 - cycling to Angkor Wat for sunrise On day 1, we started our cycling tour around 7 in the morning. We would like to make it more leisure and less tiring, thus we skipped sunrise at Angkor Wat first. We straight away headed to South Gate and our first destina...