Angkor
Angkor is incredible! A massive complex of temples and ruins. Dating back between 1200 – 700 years, each temple in itself is incredible and then to consider them as a whole and to think that it was a place of advanced civilization is just incredible.
We spent three days in the archeological park. This cost $40 US and was worth every cent. Hopefully the money goes to the right place and ensures further protection of the ruins.
On the first two days, we hired a tuk-tuk driver who took us where ever we wanted to go and would wait for us, usually playing cards with other drivers or catching a kip to beat the afternoon heat.
On the first day we went to Angkor Wat, the most famous of the temples. It is a massive 1 kilometer square complex, surrounded by a moat. The exterior of the inner temples walls were covered in bass relief sculpture. These told various stories pertaining to Hell, Earth and Heaven and the various deities and demons that occupy them. The detail of these sculptures was incredible!
Me being a knob at Angkor
Along with Angkor Wat, we visited the Bayon (One of my favorites) and Angkor Thom. The Bayon was a temple of towers. Each of these towers had 4 faces. It was quite amazing to stop and look up and see this benign face looking down at you, and then shift focus to see another face looking at you and another and another. There are over 200 faces in total all of which are about 10 foot tall.
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Elephants on their way to work.
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Monks swimming in the God Kings pool.
Angkor Thom is another massive complex and is more like the city centre than a temple. It had numerous temples within its walls, The Bayon being one of them. Also with in the complex was the Royal Palace, Walled Promenades and numerous smaller temples and The Bauphon, a massive temple that was taken apart by archaeologists for repair but during the Reign of Pol Pot all documentation was destroyed leaving it a massive Jigsaw Puzzle, Re-construction is in progress but will take years to finish.
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The Bayon temple Angkor Thom.
On the second day we got up early and drove out to Ta Phrom for sunrise. This was truly incredible. We arrived about 5:30 am and were the ONLY ones there. This is quite remarkable as the whole area in very heavily touristed. We had to walk down a jungle path in darkness to arrive at the temple which has had only structural stabilization work done to it. The whole place is overgrown with Jungle. Trees busting through the brick work with alien root structures and vines overgrowing everything. This place was left as it is so that visitors could experience it as if they had discovered it themselves. It had a very Indiana Jones feel. In fact some parts of the 1st Tomb Raider movie were shot here.
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Jade at Tah Phrom 5:30am
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The ruins at Tah Phrom. Very Indianna Jones!
Day three, we decided to hire pushbikes and ride out to the ruins. This was much easier than we expected and it only took 30 minutes from the guest house to Angkor Wat. This was by far the best way to see the ruins as being on bike allowed us the freedom to visit lesser temples or stop and feed the monkeys that roam freely along the road.
One of the less popular temples we visited was Phnom Bakheng. This is a mountain temple, meaning it’s a massive hill with stairs leading up to a temple on top. There are three ways to get up. By elephant, climb up the massive staircase (dangerous) or take the easy winding path to the top. We took option three up and the dangerous staircase down.
The temple on top was in awesome condition and had spectacular views of the whole area. I’m sure it to be closer to heaver but it’s funny to think about the construction of such a temple. The King Says “Right find a big, fuck off hill. Cool! Now build a temple on top of it with four huge staircases. Then every one climb the stairs and worship me!!”
I could go on forever about the various sites we saw but I wont. I will say that if you are visiting the region you should definitely spend some time here!