The Temples of Angkor - a dream come true!
Trip Start
Aug 21, 2007
1
8
27
Trip End
Dec 20, 2007
Siem Reap,
Cambodia
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
It's topped my must-see list for years and here we are, finally. What an enlightening haven for the senses compared with the murky quagmire of Siem Reap at its doorstep. This is my main reason for coming to the region and having seen it over the course of 3 short days it still defies any attempt at decribing it
Temple Dancers
. Hence we'll mainly let pictures speak. way more fun then my lengthy waffles anyway.Our first impression of Angkor was a most glorious sunset viewed from the hill temple Phnom Bakheng.
We then spent our first day travelling by tuc tuc to the following sites:
Angkor Thom: a 10 square km million inhabitant metropolis (at a time when London may have had a mere 50.000) surrounded by a 8 m high, 12 km long wall and a 100m wide moat full of crocodiles. Its central temple, the Bayon, has 54 towers with 256 gigantic faces peering down on you. This was mega spooky. We went there during sunrise and apart from the bats returning to their perches in the dark corridors and towers we were the only ones there. Brrrrr. there are numerous other sites here. The most tragic is a temple called the Bapuon that the French have been trying to restore for 80 years and is a tragic victim of the Khmer Rouge's horrendous regime. Because the foundations were weak the French took it apart stone by stone diligently recording what was to go where once reassembled. they just started piecing it back together when the civil war broke out leading to all documentation to be destroyed
Japanese' aliens
. Count on the French not to take a copy home...So now they're trying to stick it back together by educated guesswork. Preah Khan is a vast maze of dark corridors and also pretty spooky. It has some lovely stone carvings of temple dancers and some of the nicest features of this temple as well as Ta Som and especially Ta Prohm are the deeply rooted giant fig trees giving a glimpse of the force and certainty with which nature reclaims its land after abandonment by humans. All these temples were largely freed from the shrubs and smaller trees that had overgrown them at their rediscovery aproximately 150 years ago and only partially rebuilt using as little additional material as possible giving them a very organic and authentic feel.
The second day we hired a taxi together with Martin and Michaela
to take us a bit further afield. Our first stop was the carved riverbed of Kbal Spean. There are thousands of sculpted Lingas (hinduistic phaluses) and their female counterparts as well as hinduistic gods over which a tributary of the Siem Reap river flowed to give the land beyond fertility and luck. Sadly doesn't help anymore. The River is a filthy dump once in the city. Only towards the end of the Khmer empire did the Kingdom swich to Buddhism, like in Thailand the most prevalent religion by far
Temple dancers
. And like the Thais Cambodia also has a long reigning King with a very colourful past indeed. Prince, king, prime minister, movie star, exiled, king again, etc. The Khmer kings associated themselves with the hinduistic Gods, especially Vishnu and were revered like Gods by their subjects.Next stop were the small, but intricately carved temples of Banteay Srei.
Then we went to the temples of Beng Mealea. This is an exciting place. A huge largely collapsed heap of rubble under the jungle canopy and site of scenes from the movie "2 brothers". Doesn't sound very exciting, huh. But once one of the temple guards guides you through the rubble and you discover a carving here and a tunnel there, it's actually like one grand adventure playground a la "Tomb Raider". And the athmosphere is undescribable...and green.
Our last day we spent cycling to the closer temples and mainly to visit Angkor Wat, the largest religious structure in the world. It's as old and as high as Notre Dame cathedral. It was never fully deserted like the other temples and is in an excellent state of preservation. Its central spire depicts the hinduistic sacred Mt Meru, surrounded by four further peaks, then the lower level signifying the continents, around the temple stood the city of Angkor, with all non-religious buildings built of stone and long since decayed (only Gods and godkings could live in stone houses). The city was surrounded by a 1.5x1.3 km wall and a 190m wide moat. dimensions which reduce european castle battlements to mere model scale. What a magnificent mountain of rock. Aside from the majestic architecture there are detailed murals everywhere: the walls, the ceilings, the door and window frames. Almost life-size 3-dimensional carvings of hundreds of temple dancers. And to top it all the outside wall of Angkor Wat is itself one gigantic piece of art with some of the world's most intricate relief carvings of monumental battles between gods and demons, and the khmers and their archenemies (until the present day): the Vietnamese. We spent 5 hours here.
I'll stop here in the hope that the pictures convey some of the magic of Angkor...
