On Wednesday, Caitlin and I planned our day around watching the sunset from the Pre Rup temple in Angkor Park. We wanted a second day of exploring the temples in the park first, but we didn’t want to exhaust ourselves to the extent that we did on Monday.

Because of this, we went for a leisurely late breakfast in the city at Sister Srey Cafe and then had our tuk-tuk driver pick us up from our hotel at 2pm to take us to Angkor Park.

Our first stop in the park was the Preah Khan Temple. We were both immediately in love with this one, as it had some of the same characteristics as Ta Prohm but none of the tourists. We were starting to notice a lot of the iconography we had learned about earlier in the week throughout the temple, which was pretty fun.

We were in a courtyard on our way to explore an exterior building when thunder started rumbling above us and rain began pouring down. We initially sheltered under a tree until we realized that wasn’t doing us any good, and we ran to the nearest temple entrance where all the other visitors were huddled.

Caitlin and I got thoroughly soaked through, but we had already been so wet with sweat that this was actually a relief. Also, this was my first time getting caught in a rainstorm the entire time I’ve been in Southeast Asia in the rainy season, and I felt it had to happen at least once before I left!

When the rain slowed down a little bit, we continued exploring the temple and were shown some really cool sights, including rooms designed to echo and a gorgeous sculpture of a queen, and then we headed to the entrance to find our driver (who had somehow remained dry in the downpour and laughed to see us both completely drenched).

Our next stop was Ta Som, which had a very similar feel to the temple we had just left, though this one was a touch smaller. We spent some time exploring and ducking into its various rooms, but before long we were back in the tuk-tuk.

The next temple we visited was East Baray, which was the first we had seen that was built of bricks instead of stone. This clearly involved a more expensive and lengthy building process, and temple’s beauty still shone.

While we were here, we happened to chat with the only other American we had met in Cambodia. This woman, Rachel, had just graduated university and was traveling the area as a post-graduation trip. We discovered that she had actually spent some time growing up in Plano, Texas: the same town where Caitlin and I lived and met! This was a bizarre coincidence and a reminder that this is such a small world.

Finally, we drove to Pre Rup for our sunset viewing. We got there at about 5:15 and the sunset wasn’t until 6:30, so after we climbed up to the top of the temple, Caitlin and I found a nice step to sit down on and pulled out some leftovers from breakfast to have as a little picnic.

Half an hour later, Rachel found us again and we spent some more time chatting. The three of us got along really well and were looking forward to the sunset views, which plenty of others had also gathered for.

Unfortunately, with 10 minutes to go before sunset, a park guard started clearing everyone off the temple. Apparently it was supposed to start storming again, and they needed everyone off the site. So we missed our sunset views, but we still had a really nice day.

After Caitlin and I got back to the hotel, had a shower, and dried off, we noticed that it was storming like crazy outside. We decided not to go back out, but instead found a restaurant that would deliver pizza to us in the hotel and settled in for a cozy night of pizza and Netflix.