Siem Reap and the world heritage site of Angkor

Angkor park is massive and requires at least 3 days to get round it all. We had a day. Angkor Wat is a famous temple in the middle somewhere. A very old one. I get that. Then there are other temples and stupahs and bayons and ruins and a whole load of other ancient piles of rock which I have to confess I didn't really get at all. But hey we aren't here for a history lesson, we went to take photos and by god did we. We started at 5am and raced in the dark in our tuk-tuk against a thousand other tuk-tuks to get a good spot in front of the temple (wat) and wait for the sunrise. As far as sunrises go, it wasn't the best I've seen and the building itself I hate to say it wasn't all that either. I was more interested in the full moon that was rapidly sinking behind us, but without a tripod it simply wasn't an option for my amateur camera - in fact it didn't cope much better with the Wat either!
We moved on to other decaying buildings and had instruction from Eric about symmetry and searching for the non-standard more interesting shot which I did get to grips with eventually. After a breakfast of hard boiled eggs and mango (on account of having eaten our hotel-provided bread ham and cheese at 630!), we headed back to Preah Khan for our shoot with the monks which was nerve-racking, challenging and not altogether comfortable. But we got there in the end and I have a few images I am happy with. We had taken gifts for the monks and were taken back to a low stilted house for a blessing from them which I really did get quite into. The 3 monks were chanting in unison over our bowed heads and it was actually quite moving.
The heat in the park was ferocious and at times I felt like I was inside a kiln. I have no idea how many bottles of water I got through today, but judging by the time it took to peel my clothes off later, I lost most of it in sweat. Lunch was thankfully another success at a lovely quiet restaurant just outside the park and then it was back in for Ta Prohm - famous for being the set of the Lara Croft films with the ancient ruins being consumed by  enormous tree roots. I played with the infra red filter on my camera and took a load of arty shots to liven things up a bit. Hot as hell here.

Mum, Greg and Eric then went to the Bayon as a final location, but I simply couldn't do it in the heat and ended up discussing the probability of another war in Cambodia with our tuk-tuk driver who estimates a 3-4 year wait for a war with either the Vietnamese or the Thais. It's good to know that cabbies are somewhat similar the world over.
A spare afternoon of swimming, reading and eating followed, which gave me a chance to upload some images to the cloud for safe keeping and do some more washing.
After dinner Eric arrived in a tuk-tuk and we went to Greg's posh spa hotel on the other side of town for some post-processing tuition using the Lightroom software that we finally managed to get installed on Mum's laptop. Brilliant, easy and something I think I will be using when I get home. So much less time-consuming than Photoshop and has all the tools I need and none of the ones I don't. Perfect.
All in all a very long, hot, exhausting but enjoyable day. Tomorrow we are spending the whole day in the surrounding countryside.... rice paddies and floating villages. Bring it on.