Ancient Cambodia by Megan and emma

We are now in Siem Reap in Cambodia. We had a nice welcome at the airport and the hotel. We really like our hotel room here, it is the size of an apartment with a kitchen, two bedrooms,two bathrooms and a living room so big you could use it as a dance floor (which we have done).

Siem Reap has lots of shops selling real crocodile products. They breed the crocodiles at a farm, kill them and dye the skin to make things like handbags and belts.

That makes us feel really sad and annoyed. It is nearly as bad as the place in Laos that farmed Monkeys to sell them to China and Vietnam, to enable people to eat their brains straight out of their bodies. The guide told us about this the other day. We also saw a street seller selling fried frog, snake and crab! We are in Siem Reap to discover the temples of Angkor. Today we went to Angkor Wat, which is the main temple and is the biggest one.

They used 6000 elephants to drag all the stones to make the temple. This is after the stones were floated down the river on bamboo rafts. It took 37 years just to build the temple, and then all the carvings were completed. We saw some carvings that were not finished. There were lots of carvings of women with boobies. As the tourists had touched the boobies, they have become really shiny!

We noticed a lot of the statues were headless. This is because some were taken to sell by Thai people because the stone was valuable and they believed the head brought good luck. Also the French took some to their museums in Paris to show the world. The people are hoping they will be brought back, as some people are trying to make that happen.

When we went behind the temple to get a picture we spotted lots of wild monkeys (so cute). A guide came past with a bunch of bananas and fed them to the monkeys. We were so close we could have touched them, but did not want to because they could have rabies. The monkeys liked things that were dangling, and jumped up at a lady with a dangling camera.

As we walked back to the exit we passed some stalls, and people kept crowding round and asking us to buy things.One lady said Daddy was the bank but Daddy said the bank was CLOSED! Also loads of little kids tried to sell us postcards and bracelets for one Dollar. The kids are very poor and have to work with their Mummies and Daddies instead of going to school. As it was very hot, we only planned to spend the morning at the temples. So we walked back to our tuk tuk and came back to our hotel. We spent the rest of the day at the pool. (Which is what we have been doing for the last two days!!)