As promised: trees!

You are looking at the most photographed tree in the galaxy.

On our third day we set off in search of a tree, a particular tree, one that lodged fuzzily in our collective minds. This was a tree from a yoga magazine we had all read back in Phnom Penh, with a yogini striking a pose in the foreground. We knew that some temples were deliberately left in a semi-overgrown state, a carefully manicured jungle amid ruinous stone. So off we set on our bikes to the first temple (of many that we would search) to find the tree.

Humans are funny. Ta Prohm is the temple featured in a Laura Croft movie. Angelina Jolie crawls around on a tree. This tree, now famous, is marked in all the guide books of the Angkor region. Here is a plan of Ta Prohm. Here is the tree indicated. Here are all the tourists, crammed around the tree, jostling to take pictures of it. And around the corner, here are a half dozen more spectacular trees with no tourists.

By the way, notice that the Khmer knew about the dinosaurs (stegasaurus in the middle).

Forgetting just what our yoga tree looked like we kept travelling to other temples, further afield in search of our tourist tree. We covered 40 km by bicycle that day. We visited Ta Prohm, Ta Nei, Ta Som, and Neak Pean. Ta Nei is a charm, a small temple off in the jungle accessible only by foot or bike. It took twenty minutes to wind our way along paths through the jungle. The reward is a temple all to ourselves; we were the only people there.