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Girls' week out, Part II -- the temples @Angkor
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Temples, temples and more temples. And then some more temples. And that was just the first day!
So we started off our Official Angkor Adventure right after the Landmine Museum by taking advantage of the 'free' evening sunset--a hint if you're on your way there: if you buy your Angkor ticket after 5:00 p.m. (or was it 4:30?), you can actually go in and see what you can before twilight (or until they kick you out) and then your 3 days doesn't actually start until the next morning.
The ticket is a bit spendy--$40 for 3 days is the usual, tho you can also get a one day ticket for $20 or a week pass for who knows how much. I thought it was worth it, seeing as the money will be going towards the preservation of the temples, etc. But we were told by several people (both foreign and local) that the whole temple area is 'managed' by a foreign company/businessman (I heard Korean once and Vietnamese 2-3 times) who uses a bit of the money to build toilets, maintain roads, etc., gives something like $1 million to the Cambodian government each year and then pockets the rest as profit. I've also just read that it's a Cambodian petrol company that's the culprit. Hhmmm...would like to know more about this--anyone out there know the truth?
[**later note--I found out it is a Cambodian company, and they do indeed only use a miniscule amount of tickets sales for the restoration and maintenance of the Angkor area, keeping the rest as massive profit. Why the Cambodian government allows this is compeletely beyond me...(besides the nice, work-free percentage they get in the deal)]
Another little hint to spread 3 and a half days of smiles and laughs to the bored ticket-checker guys all over the Angkor area: when you get your photo taken at the ticket area--make a really weird face. The photo is free, surprisingly, so don't use up any precious passport photos you'll need later for all your visas to travel to Lao, Vietnam, etc.
with a simple, wacked facial gesture you could help spread the gift of laughter throughout the temple area for days
First, a bit o' history
I kind of got back into my interest in archaeology and history while I was looking up names to write these entries, so bear with me as I blather on about kings and centuries and monuments...
The Angkor area was the Khmer empire's capital from the 9th to the 15th centuries, but had already been overrun once by marauding Chams (from south Vietnam), and its decline set in rapidly in the 1400's. It was sealed with invasions by the Mongols and finally a complete sacking by the Thais from the Siam empire, Angkor's arch rivals along with the Cham. A wise Khmer ruler decided it was time to hoof it out of there and the capital was moved south to Phnom Penh. Even though many foreign travellers, traders and missionaries visited the Angkor area in the following centuries, a Frenchman named Henri Mouhot (working for the British Royal Geographical Society) is the one who's generally credited with 'rediscovering' the lost ancient temples in 1860. I read that he was originally not after archaeological finds, but looking for beetles and butterflies--interesting how things like that happen. The poor guy died the next year while suffering from malaria in the south of Lao--if only he could see the temples (and all the massage parlours!) now...
Back to our story...
Our tuk tuk man whisked us off to get our tickets and then dropped us off at the famous 'sunset hill' of Phnom Bakeng, the first major temple to be built in this area.
We hoofed it up a fairly steep incline to witness an almost sunset (it was pretty cloudy) with about 400 of our closest new friends. Hardly intimate or serene, but it was fabulous up there, that first real contact with the temples and a fantastic view over the jungle below and rice paddies and Lake Tonle Sap out to the west. Bummer bout the clouds and the crowd, but what can you expect from the country's biggest tourist draw in the middle of the rainy season??
The next three days were spent alternatingly bouncing around in the back of the tuk tuk and then wandering around in a stupor trying to comprehend the amazing architecture and atmosphere we were smack in the middle of. I have to admit that at the time we were actually there, I was fairly lax about researching details of all the temples, dates, names, legends--my former academic anthropology self was turning over in her grave. But honestly, I was just enjoying being able to climb all over the ruins, take gazillions of photos (oooohh, so many door and window pics, all my friends who've sat thru my photos before will be happy to know) and soak in a bit of the ancient vibe, all with my bud Carmen as well. To her credit, she's not normally into this kind of stuff and she was really patient with me when I'd wander off and lose myself in a corridor for 30 minutes snapping pics. She even got into photography herself with her new camera--maybe she'll lend some of her great shots for this site--Carms????? :)
Day 1: Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat
Angkor Thom ("Great City") is a huge complex of several temples and open areas within a walled area about 3 square km. The 100m wide moat is pretty dried up now, but it's still impressively...well, wide. We were dropped off among busloads of tourists at the south Gopura, a huge 23m tower gate with faces on each side for the 4 compass points. We spent ages looking at the line of giants and demons on either side of the road leading up to the gate. They're using nagas (long, many-headed Buddhist serpent-like creatures that guard Buddha and wats) for a tug-o-war, part of a Hindu legend called the Churning of the Ocean of Milk (that's a lotta milk). And unfortunately we saw immediately the damage that centuries of looting has done--loads of the poor giants and demons were missing heads or had newer reconstructed cement heads that didn't match their older, lichen-covered stone bodies. Don't you HATE it when that happens? I think our tuk tuk driver was expecting us to waltz through the gate to meet him on the other side after 5 minutes or so, but we must have spent at least 25 minutes there. That basically set the tone for the whole Angkor trip: while other people were zipping around from before sunrise to after sunset, seeing 10 or 15 or more temples a day, we spent eons at each one, for a grand total of about 4 that day. Less is more, right?
The Bayon
Inside the gate of Angkor Thom, we headed for the Bayon, a truly amazing, 3-tiered temple that's a mixture of piles of stone and incredible bas-reliefs and towers. There are 54 towers in all, many still with the original giant faces on them, one on each side like the Gopura gates. The faces are wicked--as in very groovy. They've all got these really mysterious, serene, blissful half-smiles, kind of like when you're really full after a delicious Sunday brunch and now you're stretching out on the floor in the sun for a little nap, aaahhhhh... :) The faces are supposedly of either the ruler Jayavarman VII 'in his divine state', or maybe of a Bodhistatva (go look that one up on google for a much more accurate explanation than I could give!), or maybe even of Buddha himself. Ol' Jayavarman VII (can't quite make my brain not say that as Javaman...) was like Egypt's Ramses II (Ramses the Great) in that they are both well-known as rulers who had huge numbers of huge and elaborate monuments and temples built in their honor during their reigns. Nice little ego trip, eh?
To get up to the towers you have to go through an incredible set of maze-like corridors, steps, stairs and ladders. Everywhere you look is another amazing doorway looking through more doorways, all covered in moss or carvings. Carmen and I of course got separated within about 10 minutes of entering, but we found each other again at the top about 45 minutes later. In the meantime, I joined a throng of other tourists who were practically tripping over each other to get pics of a monk who was lounging in his orange-brown robes in a doorway. I thought it was divine timing of some sort, but during the next few days I came to see that many monks do it on purpose as a way to meet foreigners so they can practice their English. Clever boys. I met this particular one later in a corridor and talked with him for a while. He asked me for help with his English, and handed me a notebook. I had immediate visions of correcting homework, but he'd given me a hand-written autobiography describing how poor he was and how many other tourists had given him a lot of money already and could I please help him too? Gave me a really odd feeling in the pit of my stomach for some reason, and I somewhat hastily excused myself to go find Carmen.
Throughout this as well as the other temples in the Angkor area, there are places that are still very much working worshipping areas where monks and nuns offer incense sticks to you (for a small fee...) and encourage you to give up a minute or two for Buddha while you're there. The combination of sunlight and shadow and incense smoke with little, wizened and wrinkled robed monks and nuns is a photographer's dream. I really need some lessons on how to balance the light and dark, tho...
Like a lot of SE Asia, Hinduism was the first major religion at the Angkor court, but was later replaced by Buddhism. Lots of images were destroyed during the changeovers (first to Buddhism, then back to Hinduism, then back again!), but in a nice little cosmic harmony thing (for once), a lot of the Hindu carvings were either kept intact or blended in with newer Buddhist-oriented art throughout Angkor. It's really interesting to see the mix as you wander around, even though I don't know much about either (I guess I'll learn more when I make it to India later on).
And this temple in particular is surrounded by walls with amazingly preserved bas-relief carvings of scenes of war (the boat battle with the Chams was a common one) and daily life at the market, playing games, etc. Carms and I walked the whole perimeter looking for the childbirth scenes that were described in several guides, but we mostly only saw war war war. Go figure--it was a popluar theme back then (like now, unfortunately...).
The Bracelet Kids
We found our poor little bored driver at the noodle stands on the other side of the Bayon about 3 hours later--I think he was assuming we'd got lost! We had a nice little lunch and were soon surrounded by ingenious little kids trying to sell us lots of stuff we couldn't possibly need by using some very clever selling tactics and incredibly good English. "Hey, if I tell you the capital of your country, will you buy something from me?" Oi, who taught them that one?? They knew New Zealand's, but they didn't know Uzbekistan's (my occasional adoptive country when I travel and I'm bored with saying where I'm from!).
One thing about travelling with Carmen is that she attracts kids like...well, I won't use that analogy for such a sweet scene, but you get the idea! While I'm the sort of tourist who usually says thanks but no thanks and then either walks out of range or completely ignores them, Carmen starts up a conversation with them and soon has them crowding around and leaning all over the table, babbling away about their families, their lives and their profit margins! And of course she ends up with a pile of books, 13 bracelets and 43 postcards. Ah, the heart in her!
It was really interesting to chat with those kids, finding out they sell all day, every day on their holidays (like now), and when they're at school, they come and sell after they get out of class (but business isn't so good in the afternoon--it's much better in the morning). Most of them give the money to their parents or use it so they can learn English at school (they have to pay extra for English lessons from their teachers), but some of the boys had their hearts set on a new football. And they told us about how the local police force them to pay a bribe every month in order to keep selling (and the woman at restaurant #26 is mean and shoos them away when they're in her area). Needless to say, we both ended up with bracelets and smiles and a couple of nice photos.
Antiquities in the Rain
We made the big jump across the road from the lunch area to continue the tour, but it started to pour rain just as we started to look at the famous Terrace of the Elephants and the Terrace of the Leper King (!?!?), a platform area where kings and their entourages would watch processions stream by on the road below. We waited it out in an ancient doorway to the pyramidal Phimeanakas temple, which we climbed (much to Carmen's horror when she saw the steep stairs!) after it cleared up. Legend has it that the king had to climb the stairs every night to sleep with the snake goddess or else the kingdom would fail. Good one. The temple itself is interestingly a lot like the tall, square-ish temples in the Yucatan in Mexico and in Tikal, Guatemala. I have to look up that controversial theory about how ancient Asians and Central/South Americans (and Egyptians?) might have shared architechtual hints about pyramids with each other waaayyyy in the past. Wasn't it Thor Hyerdaal (sp??) who sailed a bamboo raft across the Pacific to prove it was possible for them to have actually had contact? A good rainy day internet project...
Angkor Wat
By the time we finished our wanderings in Angkor Thom, it was late afternoon and we'd only visited one temple complex so far--GASP, what a newbie no-no!! Our driver just laughed at us (more time for him to lounge in the shade and talk with is friends?) and we shot off down the road to the famous 5-towered Angkor Wat so we could have an hour or two before the sun set. Well, shot off as in 'puttered very slowly', cause our driver seemed to be the absolute SLOWEST driver in Cambodia. But safe, which is good. And it gave us more time to look at the passing scenery, I guess!
Every guidebook waxes lyrical about Angkor Wat, saying that the walk into the inner courtyard with the reflecting pools is magical, amazing, will change your life. Well...maybe we were a bit tired from the day already, or maybe we were not in the right frame of mind, because...ummm...it just didn't live up to that kind of expectation for either of us. Don't get me wrong--it's an awesome and incredible piece of architecture, and certainly beautiful, but both of us found it to be pretty lifeless compared to the Bayon, which was virtually dripping with atmosphere and funky vibes.
It was built in the 1110's as a tribute to the Hindu god Vishnu, and the towers represent mythical Mount Meru, the center of the universe (and all this time I thought it was me!). There are some really well preserved bas-reliefs of apsaras, the famous clestial dancing women of Angkor. They all seem to have forgotten to cover up their boobs, tho. Boobs that we decided looked suspiciously like Brittany Speare's...
There are three levels inside the main temple, and to Carmen's horror again, lots of really steep stairs. Steep and TALL stairs. Even with my long legs it was a stretch to get up them. This is also true of the stairs at Tikal and in Mexico, strangely. The modern people of these countries aren't very tall on average, so the ancient ones who built these places were probably even shorter. We kept returning to this question again and again over the three days: why did they make such hellishly tall steps and how did they get up them with their little short legs!??!?!!? Inquiring minds need to know.
Halfway up the first stairway, Carmen got caught in a wickedly strong blast of wind--a storm was coming in, and coming fast. Hhhmmm...getting stranded up on the top level of an ancient monument at dusk in a rain and wind storm with no way down except a bunch of slippery, too-tall steps. Sounds like a plan!
We hung out on the top level and chatted until the storm had passed--but not enough to leave a clear enough sky for sunset again, unfortunately. But I did reun into my friend the monk-who-wants money as he was showing his book to some other tourists and asking first for some English help and then hit them up for donations. As soon as they realized what he wanted they had a similar reaction as me--they laughed, gave the book back and turned around and left. We dubbed him the Angkor Twat.
And by then, we were ready to call it a day, so we headed back to Siem Reap for Happy Hour and a promise to meet our driver the next morning at 8:30--disgustingly late for the usual temple-touring, but we didn't care!
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| 26. | Girls' week out, Part II -- the temples @Angkor - Siem Reap, Cambodia Jul 28, 2004 (  8 ) |
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