This was shot about an hour outside of Siem Reap in a remote temple that is not often visited. I was very happy to go and explore all the reliefs…. I could not recommend it more!

At the top of this crumbling ruin at a temple several km from Angkor Wat was this overgrown hole. Hot and moist vegetation seeped down into the lower chamber.

The apsaras sprung from the churned milk of the Rig Veda and entertain the gods and fallen heroes with their dancing winsome ways. Every apsara is in a slightly different pose as thousands of them stare outwards from the ruins in and around Angkor Wat. Each figure is almost a millennia old, and they still maintain the fine craftsmanship through the tropical growth and the jungle heat.

I’ve never sweat as much in my life as I did while exploring the remote parts of Cambodia. This temple was about an hour by sketchy motorbike outside of Siem Reap. There was absolutely no shade anywhere, since the only parts of the temple that remained standing offered no cover at all!

It was a beautiful late morning in Angkor Wat in the jungles of Cambodia. I sat by the lake and drank Vietnamese coffee for 3 hours, watching the sunrise with a finger on my wired shutter release… occasionally stirring around to wipe the dew off the lens.

I was in a remote area of Angkor Wat by myself, or so I thought. For whatever reason, there was absolutely nobody around and I was searching parts of the old abandoned temple entirely by myself. I came through a passage to find these three monks resting on the stairs.

I spent a very long time in and around the temple with a monk friend I had made. We walked all around while I gave him the third degree on Cambodia and the Khmer Empire.

This is part of a new textures tutorial I have going up  later this week!

These are the golden heads of Suryavarman II in Angkor Thom in Cambodia. His face is all over every tower in every direction. I can only imagine a similar temple with Hillary’s grizzled visage staring out in every direction…

We call him "Survivorman" among my friends because we play a lot of Civilization IV and the Khmers are one of the races that always comes up. We have trouble saying his real name, so now we just default to the Discovery Channel guy.

And yes… I know this picture is BUSY, but that’s okay when you wanna get busy with this sorta thing.

This is one of the remote temples in the jungles around Angkor Wat. It remained buried in the jungle for several hundred years before it was rediscovered by Englishmen drinking tea and probably saying, “Blimey!”

Another ancient, remote, and abandoned hallway in Angkor Wat…. Wooo! No Tourists! I love taking my time to get the shot!

It took many more hours of sweaty hacking through the jungles of Cambodia to find this place, but it was well worth it. The temple was in worse condition than most of the others around Angkor Wat… although there was still plenty of great stuff to explore.

Also, a gentle reminder to vote for the 2008 Bloggies! I hope you vote for www.stuckincustoms.com in the "best photography of a weblog" category!

There was a storm coming in through Siem Reap as I approached the entrance to the temple. There was hardly anyone around and I figured if it started to pour (which it did), I could just hang out inside one of the old tombs for a while (which I did). You would think that maybe you could get interesting pictures in the rain, but I have never been able to do anything of note.

One of my favorite things about the temple at Angkor Wat is that it laid buried and hidden in the jungle for hundreds of years. It’s amazing that a wonder of the old world can just be overgrown in such a short time. Although after taking a bathroom break out in that jungle, I was almost fully absorbed in my two minutes of anxious snake-watching.

This was shot inside of one of the shrines in Angkor Wat… and yes I know Shiva is typically a Hindu God and Buddhists don’t roll that way… but the religion around Cambodia is an interesting mix…

These three monks were on the side of Angkor Wat, out taking a break and collecting some fruit from a tree for a snack.

Apsaras are female spirits of the clouds and waters and stem from Buddhist and Hindu mythology. There are countless carvings of the Apsaras, most of them topless and posed, all over Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Angkor Wat has an interesting mix of Hinduism and Buddhism that I won’t go into right now… maybe in a later post I can talk more about it. As you can see here, you see a traditional Buddhist worshipper in front of a statue of Shiva.