A friend of mine from Saigon came to visit me. It was her first time in Cambodia so of course she wanted to see the temples at Angkor. She didn't know much about the place, but she had seen her friend's pictures of sunrise at Angkor Wat. The one thing she wanted to do was get those same photos.
She was on limited time so there was only one morning we could go. We were unbelievably fortunate with the weather, considering we are officially in the rainy season. We had two hot, sunny days for sightseeing. The guys working at the hotel said we would have to wake up at 4:30 and leave by 5 a.m. to see the sunrise. They arranged a tuk-tuk driver for us. He agreed to meet us at 5 a.m.
There was a knock on my hotel door at 4:36 a.m. It was the tuk-tuk driver. We were supposed to leave at 5, I said. He said, no, we were supposed to leave at 4:30. There was no point in arguing. I said I would be ready as soon as possible. I showered quickly, which is easy when you have no hair, threw on some clothes and went downstairs.
I asked where my friend was. What friend, he asked? He woke me up but he didn't wake her up. I knocked on her door. She too was confused but she got ready in record time. We were on the road by 4:50 a.m.
Unfortunately the sun was already coming up as we were leaving. We were late before we had even left. I was &%$#ing furious. I had made it abundantly clear that the one thing my friend came all the way from Vietnam to see was sunrise at Angkor Wat, and we missed it. She handled it much better than I did. (She's a much nicer person than I am.) We got there for the tail end of the sunrise, but we missed the best part.
How on earth could the guys at the hotel screw this up? They only make these arrangements every single day of the year! Even if we had left at 4:30, as our driver wrongly said we had agreed to do, we still would have been late! We would have gotten up at 2 a.m. if necessary to be there on time.
Hard to believe, but we weren't the only ones there.
There was a steady stream of tourists, many of whom were suffering from sunrise sickness. This is my phrase for people who are so obsessed with seeing and getting photos of a sunrise that they revert to a barbaric, pre-human state. I had first noticed this phenomenon on Poon Hill in Nepal. Civility, courtesy and basic human decency vanish. It's as if all the boys in "Lord of the Flies" were given cameras, loaded on a bus and dumped off at the temple.
By the time we got to the reflecting pool it was light out. This is the number one spot for taking pictures of Angkor Wat. Everyone who visits here has their photo taken here with the temple in the background and reflected in the water. Good luck getting a decent shot at sunrise!
The time mixup was just the beginning of a series of mishaps with our tuk-tuk driver. The previous day we had a similarly bad experience with another driver. If you go to Siem Reap, I don't stay at the King Angkor Villa hotel. If you do stay there, don't use their drivers. Find your own.
More on my experience as a first-time tour guide in later, longer post.
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