Angkor has the potential to be on par with the greatest sites in the world. It is as magnificient as the Taj Mahal, as expansive as the Great Wall, and as exotic as Machu Pichu. Unfortunately, Angkor is located in Cambodia, a country that until recently was as welcoming to tourists as the Gaza Strip is to kosher deli's.

Most Americans are familiar with "The Killing Fields," Pol Pot's reign of terror that decimated Camodian society for four years after the US pulled out of Southeast Asia in the Spring of 1975. What much of the world doesn't know is that Cambodia has been in more or less a continuous state of civil war since the Khmer Rouge was forced from power by the invading Vietnamese in 1979. Officially the Khmer Rouge gave up their insurgency for good in 1998 (shortly after Pol Pot finally died), but troubles still boil over here. About a month ago armed gunmen stormed the capital, Phnom Penh, killing several people.

Cambodia today is a country trying to claw its way back. It has a quasi-democratic goverment, and it has reinstated its monarchy for a bit of grandeur. But it is going to take a long, long time to recover. Land mines continue to be a very real threat. A staggering 1 in 230 Cambodians has lost a limb to landmines! Their entire intellectual community was erased by Pol Pot, and the wars since then have eliminated another generation. The peace today is fragile. A large portion of the Khmer Rouge guerillas were re-christened as official government soldiers, and no one knows exactly where their loyalties truly lie. Corruption is rampant in the government, and dueling political parties battles aren't just fought at the ballot box.

Still, somehow, in the short few years that Cambodia has been "back on the map" it has earned a reputation as a wonderful place to visit. As with Laos, travelers tell tales of friendly locals and laid-back hospitality. Bad roads, good people.

From our island paradise on Ko Lanta, Sarah and I had a 30 hour travel marathon to get to Siem Reap. Pickup truck, motorcycle sidecar, minivan, car ferry, another minivan, another ferry, overnight train ride, taxi, airplane, bus, taxi.

Siem Reap is a small town in northwest Cambodia. As we wandered around town shortly after arriving, it became very clear that we were in a desperate country. We walked down a pot-holed street -- main street -- and passed several beggars, all missing limbs. Gas stations were just untidy racks of 2 liter plastic soda bottles filled with petrol. Trinket vendors sold woven bamboo bracelets for pennies.

Even through its dusty overcoat, though, the town managed to convey a strong elegance. Many of the original French colonial buildings remained, and tourist dollars had even paid for the restoration of several. We walked on a boulevard along a small river that was lined with big old trees. We walked through a well maintained park with trim grass and neat hedges. People laughed and smiled.

Back at our guesthouse, we asked fellow travelers for their advice on touring the ruins, and we flipped through our guidebooks for some historical perspective. Angkor Wat itself is actually just one of hundreds of ruins in the area. It is one of the largest and best preserved, but any visitor here has to save most of their time for exploring the other, lesser-known, sites. Angkor Wat is located just 5 kilometers north of Siem Reap, and another large cluster of ruins called Angkor Thom is a few miles north of that. Many more ruins are spread over dozens of miles both east and west.

The temples were built between the 9th and 14th centuries. At various time during this period, the god-kings of the Khmer empire ruled over lands that stretched from modern-day India, to Vietnam, to China, and the archetecture of the temples reflects the primary competing faiths of the regions: Buddhism and Hinduism. It wasn't uncommon for a temple to be built as a Hindu shrine, converted to Buddhist by a later emporer, and then re-converted back to Hinuism by the next.

Time hasn't been kind to the temples. They have faced treasure hunters, over-eager museum curators, acid rain, restoration projects both bad and good, and even local villagers who cart off the convenient sandstone blocks to make things like pig-sty's. The greatest decay, though, has been caused by the ever-encroaching jungle. The relentless foliage claws at the walls, weakening foundations and toppling ceilings.

What this means to the modern day visitor is an incredible variety, a feast for the eyes. Everything from beautifully restored temples with elaborate carvings to jungle-encrusted jumbles of stone. There are even undiscovered sites lurking nearby. Just last year, a team of scientists announced that with the help of sattelite imagery they had located a previously unknown temple just a few hundred yards from Preah Khan, one of the main sites on the tourist route.

Sarah and I hired motorbike guides. For $6 a day they would drive us to whatever sites we wanted to see, and wait for us outside. We bought a three-day pass to the ruins, expensive by Asian standards at $40, but well worth it. Our first site was the walled city of Angkor Thom. As we approached the south gate I suddenly appreciated the massive scale of the place. Angkor Thom was over 10 km square and it was completely encircled in a huge stone wall and wide moat. Five gates pierced the wall, each huge and elaborately carved, and flanking each gate were two Naga, 5-headed cobras, made out of stone. The Naga were each 50 or 60 feet long and served as the railing on each side of the bridge across the moat.

Once inside the gate it was another several minutes of driving to reach the cluster of temples at the center. Although Angkor Thom was a city estimated to have housed over one million people, the wooden houses of the common people are long gone, now replaced by jungle. Only the stone houses of the gods remain. We walked around The Bayon, an elaborate temple with 54 stone towers. Each tower was adorned with giant, 15-foot tall faces, and wherever we stood in the temple there were always 5 or 6 faces staring down at us. The perimeter of The Bayon houses intricately carved stone tablets -- Bas Reliefs -- depicting every day life in the 12th century. Unfortunately I was reading from the wrong page in our guidebook as we examined the bas reliefs, so we mis-interpreted every single one of them.

Next, we walked to other nearby sites: Baphuon, Phimeanakas, Preah Palilay. We saw the "Terrace of Elephants," an impressive 350 meter long reviewing stand decorated with a long parade of elephants. At one of the smaller temples in the area a group of young local boys gave us an informal tour. They asked for money at the end, of course, but we were happy to give them a tip because they pointed out quite a number of things we wouldn't have otherwise noticed. The kids were only 8 or 9, but they had taught themselves excellent English. We saw many more kids just like them all over the area. Young, smart, desparately poor kids working really hard as guides or vendors. It was both impressive to see how smart they were, and depressing to think about the poverty that motivated them.

That afternoon we toured Angkor Wat. Like Angkor Thom it was surrounded by a large moat and wall. Inside, the jungle had been cleared. A large grassy field and two reflecting pools provided a stunning view of the multi-towered central temple. We approached via a raised stone walkway, then began climbing up into the temple itself. We passed through several courtyards and saw the libraries in which the sutras were held. The stairs up to the highest (third) level were extremely steep, maybe 60 degrees. Each step was so narrow we had to turn our feet sideways. I have no idea how the ancient priests could have ascended these same stairs without the use of the handrail that had recently been added.

Angkor Wat was big and impressive, but the real hilight of our trip to Cambodia was yet to come. The next morning, we tourned a couple of ruins that hadn't been cleared of jungle. These sites -- Banteay Kdei, Ta Prohm, and Preah Khan -- have been restored just enough to grant visitors safe access, but trees and roots and vines were left creeping over the ruins. Leaving the ruins in a relative state of decay has caused some controversy, and as one archaeologist wrote in 1942:

The tourist. . .who travels in style and comfort to visit the ruins where he expects to experience the exhilaration of Mouhot discovering Angkor Wat in 1860. . .is driven by an outdated individualism, and all that counts for him is a romaticism fuelled by spectacular effects, as sybmolised by a section of wall crumbling in the passionate tentacled embrace of voracious trees.

That was yesterday, and I didn't think we could top it. But today we smacked a home-run right out of the park. Today we faced all the stuff I had pictured when I pictured travelling in Asia. We bounced over rough dirt roads, we bribed officials, we got stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere, armed militia escorted us through the woods, and -- best of all -- we saw overgrown-ruins-in-the-jungle.

After two days on motorbikes we had seen most of the main ruins near Siem Reap. Our butts were sore, but we hadn't yet been "templed out". So for our third and final day at Angkor we decided to hire a van and driver with a few others from our guesthouse and travel to some of the more remote sites. We got up at 5 AM, not knowing quite what to expect.

The first hour of our drive was supposed to be the easy part. We were headed east on Cambodia's main highway, Highway 6, which connects Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. But before we even left town the pavement degraded into intermittent dirt and potholes. The potholes were so big that our full-length van actually drove down into them before coming back up. I had heard roads were bad in Cambodia, but even so we were surprised by just how bad they were.

After an hour we turned off the highway onto a dirt path. This road was bad, but it wasn't that much worse than the "paved" road we had been travelling on. Most of the road was extremely dry and dusty, but at frequent intervals we drove through muddy pits. We were in rice-growing land. The season was over so the fields were brown and dry, and the villagers just sat in their stilt houses staring out at us as we passed.

The road split and we took the smaller fork. We came to a bridge that had been washed out, but a makeshift platform had been layed across the gap. It didn't look like it could hold our weight, so we begged our driver to let us off the van before driving across. He made it, we re-boarded and continued on.

We came to a point where the road was completely washed out. A muddy pool of stagnate water covered our path. Villagers had laid two wet and slippery tree trunks in the across the pool. We all assumed this was the end of the road and we would have to give up, but our driver motored on. With all of us standing by, he gunned the engine, aiming his tires at those two tree trunks. His front wheels got about 2 feet out into the pool before slipping off the trunks, where they slid sideways, dropping into the pool, and wedging the bumper firmly into one of the tree trunks. We were stuck.

For about 45 minutes we tried pushing and shoving and digging. We wedged stuff under the rear tires. We tried pushing forward and backwards. Twice, ox-carts came by towing big loads of wheat. They just waded into the pool and continued on, staring at us in our cheesy REI expedition clothes and fancy van, going nowhere.

By luck, a road crew (probably the only one in Cambodia) with a large backhoe was nearby and offered to tow us out for a small bribe. We resisted for a while, but when it became clear there was no other way out we gave in and paid them.

Now we were sure we were done for the day. Our road was blocked, our van was dented, but our driver said he wanted to continue. Big teams of Harvard physicists could examine our situation. They would measure the angles and the momentum and the potential gravity and all that stuff, and they would conclude with absolute certainty that it was impossible to cross. Impossible.

But in a burst of Asian logic that I still can't understand, our driver gunned his engine and roared towards those same to slippery logs and . . . impossibly . . . made it across. I have no idea how.

From there it was just a short drive to our destination. We pulled over next to a motley group of people -- a guy in a western clothing, two young army soldiers carrying automatic weapons, and two monks in bright orange robes. This is where bribe number two for the day came in. We had to pay $5 each to the soldiers for "protection" while we toured the ruins.

We followed the guy in civilian clothing and one of the soldiers into the jungle, and quickly came upon a rough stone wall. This was the outer wall of Bang Mealea, a massive temple that was completely engulfed by the jungle. The next few hours were indescribable. Absolutely amazing. This temple sees very few visitors, and no restoration has been done, not even any clearing of the foliage. We scrambled over tumbled piles of stone -- collapsed walls -- and climbed into dark passageways. In places, the jungle had done almost no damage and we could see beautiful carvings and decorations. In other places trees had collapsed ceilings and pillars, reducing them to piles of rubble. For hours we trampled through the ruins, under the cover of the jungle.

Eventually our "guides" said it was time to go. We could have easily stayed there for hours more, but we opted not to argue with the kid with the machine gun. And so we went.

We drove a few hours to another amazing site, Kobal Spien. Kobal Spien is a stream about a half-hour hike up a gently sloped mountain. It's a normal mountain stream in a pretty area north of Siem Reap, but what makes it impressive is that the Khmers carved intricate patterns into the stone of the river bed. For hundreds of yards, way up in the middle of nowhere, the river flows right over the top of beautiful stone carvings. We sat next to the river for a while, watching the water dance over the carvings in the sun light, then followed the stream down the mountain.