Angkor Wat

The temples of Angkor are among those World Heritage sites which leave you a little stunned and awestruck at first encounter. That first view of Angkor Wat, the biggest of them, is on a par with that first glimpse of the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, Uluru, or the wilderness of Tasmania.

The sheer size of it gets you. It covers about 2 square kilometres, and the moat around it is 190m across - putting to shame that of any European castle. There are kilometres of passageways inside the inner and outer walls, all engraved with intricate carvings. It was built by 300,000 workers and 6000 elephants, about 900 years ago, when it is thought that Angkor may have been the world's biggest city.

I spent a couple of hours there on my first visit, to get a feel for the place before continuing my 'petit tour' of several of the other temples. Then in the afternoon, I finished up at the nearby hilltop temple from where people get to see it in warm sunset colours. A couple of days later, when my three-day $40 ticket was about to run out, I went back there for the whole afternoon. This is when I got my 'sunset reflections in the lily pond shots', along with dozens of other keen photographers that day.

Among the subjects frequently seen in the bas reliefs are the apsaras, the temple dancers. Here is one of the modern dance troupes with their new international recruit!

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