I’m writing this on January 2nd - our first day off and after 3 and a half days visiting the temples. It’s been a great time – some magnificent sites and certainly having our own driver for the whole time made it a really enjoyable experience. Anyway, back to the blog.
Off for our first day of temple touring today. One ticket covers all the temples and you buy a 3-day pass for $US40 per person. The ticket office is on the way to Angkor Wat (the first temple out of Siem Reap) and when you purchase your ticket, there is a little digital camera connected to the ticket machine that snaps your photo and then prints it on your ticket. All very good for security, fraud and as a souvenir of your visit. The digital photo thing seems all the rage in Asia, as we’d experienced the same thing at Bangkok Airport both on arrival and departure.
Armed with our tickets we headed to Angkor Wat, the Big Kahuna of Cambodian temples and believed to be the largest religious structure in the world. Legend has it that when one of the historic kings died, he took his eldest son to the heavens with him, however, he was turned away (sorry, not sure why – maybe too young, or possibly not dead) but as compensation he was allowed to have one of the heavenly buildings built for him on earth. Being a modest chap and not wanting to piss off the gods, he decided to have the celestial ox stables built as his dwelling on earth and hence we now have Angkor Wat, or what has been described as the 8th wonder of the world.
Anyway, we were dropped off outside “the Ox Stables” and preceded to make our way over the causeway which crosses the very large (190m wide) moat to the entrance to Angkor Wat. The temple complex is a massive rectangle 1.5km x 1.3km with gates at the 4 points of the compass and causeways on the East and West gates. The West Gate is the main entrance and the one that we entered through. Once inside the outer wall, the causeway continues right up to the front of the temple past two small stone buildings (libraries – one on either side of the causeway). One of the pools was full of pink lilies and made the other one look very low rent, until you realized that without the lilies, the empty pool created a perfect reflection of the main temple.
Entry to the Wat is via incredibly steep stone stairs. To make it easier and safer for the huge number of tourists that now visit the temple each year, wooden steps have been created over the stone steps, that are of a much flatter gradient. Because there are so many different points that you can enter the temple it is still easy to find the more vertically challenging original stone steps to clamber in and out of the various levels of the temple.
The temple itself if massive (1025m x 800m) and richly decorated with beautiful bas-reliefs (stone carvings). They depict a varied and vast array of battles between armies, heaven and hell, gods and demons, good and evil and the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which is apparently (according to Lonely Planet for one) the most famous of the carvings and depicts 88 Asuras (devils) and 92 Devas (goddesses) churning the sea to extract the elixir of immortality.
As I said, the temple is built on a number of layers and we clambered up and down these, marveling at the engineering, the craftsmanship, the magnitude and magnificence of it all and wandered through the grounds for almost 3 hours before returning to our driver and on to the next great temple – Bayon, which is contained in the Angkor Thom temple complex.
Angkor Thom (Great City) is actually a bigger temple complex (some 10sq kms) than Angkor Wat, but the Bayon, which is the main temple in the complex is much smaller than Angkor Wat. Bayon which is the creation of Jayavarman VII (who seems to have been a prolific temple builder and created many of the temples in the area) is famous for it’s four faced towers. When I say 4 faced, look at the photos – a big smirking face on each side of the tower and there are 54 towers, so 216 faces looking out in four directions. The temple itself is in something of a state of disrepair, so you have to clamber over some ruins in some instances. Having said that, there is still plenty standing and you can climb the multiple levels to different perspectives and get yourself closer to the gods. Academics don’t know the significance of Bayon, but believe the faces have been created in Jayavarman VII’s image, so the smirk is appropriate, given that nobody knows what it’s there for.
Next to Bayon is the Baphuon temple, which, like Angkor Wat you enter over a long causeway. Baphuon is undergoing a massive restoration project, so we weren’t allowed inside, but did get to walk around the back to see the huge reclining Buddha that has been carved into the outer wall of the temple. Restoration of this Buddha was completed a few years ago, but continuing subsidence issues and the fact it probably isn’t very good made recognizing the Buddha something of a challenge for my man’s eyes.
A stop for lunch and then on to Ta Keo temple. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but neither of us really recall what this small temple was like. It’s biggest claim to fame is that it was struck by lightening during construction at which point they all downed tools and never came back to finish it.
Ta Prohm, our next temple suffers from no such obscurity. It is known as the forest temple, not only because it is so far into the jungle, but because the jungle has so completely taken over the actual temple buildings themselves. Trees have sprouted in the walls and roves of the temple and over the centuries have grown into massive trees, with their root systems completely encapsulating the temples. Again a lot of this temple has been reduced to piles of stone, but the beauty of the forest setting and the magnificence of the building that remain made this one of our favourite temples.
With each successive temple we visited, the number of children approaching us to sell us books, postcards, scarves, table cloths and drinks kept growing. Unlike our trip to Vietnam in 1996, the selling in Cambodia is much more less pushy, although that could be a result of us visiting Vietnam much earlier in its development and the Cambodians generally seeming much better off and consequently better fed than the Vietnamese at that time. The easiest thing to do is if you’re “childrened out” for the day was simply to make friendly hand signals, but not to speak and then they would go away. For the rest of the time, if you talk to them, then at least they get to practice their English, as there is a limit to how many scarves and postcards and one person could want.
Banteay Kdei was our second to last temple for the day. This was a long flat temple like Ta Prohm (rather than in vertical layers like Angkor Wat and Bayon) that also like Ta Prohm was also very broken down. That in itself is not hugely important, because you can still get an excellent impression of what the temples were like and what the overall environment was like. Each one was a very pleasant and relaxing walk and armed with our guide book and map, we were able to get a good understanding of the history and importance of each temple.
Although we had had a long day by this stage, we couldn’t help but be impressed with not only the grandeur of the temples, but also the shear number of them that are crammed into such a small area and this was only the first day and we still had two more days of temple visiting ahead of us.
Our final temple for the day was Prasat Kravan, which fortunately was a very small brick temple right beside the road, so we didn’t have to walk too much more, because by the end of the day we were well exhausted and looking forward to a few cold beers at the 5-7pm happy “hour”.
For dinner that night, we stuck with posh nosh and ate at a hotel down the road. We had looked at staying there when we were planning our trip because it’s a training school for young Cambodians and its restaurant got rave reviews on Trip Advisor. We couldn’t get into the hotel, but the restaurant was top notch and right up to the mark of the people who had reviewed it. The 6 hour time difference meant that we again crashed early after a long but rewarding day.
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