Angkor Wat

It's been a long day walking up and down a lot of steep stairs. I met my driver after breakfast at nine o'clock this morning. He brought his moto and we set of for a day of touring the ruined temples that stretch over the countryside north of Siem Reap.

The main tourist stops are all withing ten or fifteen kilometers of the city but some of the earlier temples are as far as eighty. We started at Angkor Thom, which is a huge walled city containing an impressive number of temples and monuments. I quickly realized I had hugely underestimated the scope of Khmer construction. Today, I saw only a handful of literally hundreds of buildings.

I spent a little over an hour walking around Angkor Thom and getting an impromptu tour from a local waiting by one of the temples. Most of the popular temples have at least a dozen Cambodians waiting to tell visitors about the structure's history. Some guides are barely fluent in English, but others deliver an engaging narrative. I liked my guide at Ta Prohm. He was probably fifteen years old and had a slight Australian accent. I think he does quite well for himself--I noticed he was wearing a nice neck chain and his cellphone rang once during our tour.

At each stop my driver Voun would suggest a few things to see and then tell me where I could meet him when I was done. After Angkor Thom I found him with a group of drivers and tour workers playing a game similar to hacky-sack but with a shuttlecock. I joined the game for about fifteen minutes and managed not to embarrass myself.

From Angkor Thom, we went to Ta Prohm, which Hollywood made famous in the file Tomb Raider. Ta Prohm is in the process of being broken down and reclaimed by the jungle. Huge trees are growing around, on top of, and through the walls of the temple, forcing the blocks apart with their roots.

I ate lunch at one of the many tent pavilions that sit across the road from many of the temples. There doesn't seem to be much difference from one establishment to the next, in fact the only way to tell where one ends and another begins is that they are numbered. I met a man from Montana who has been traveling in Southeast Asia since October and got to hear some interesting stories.

After lunch, we stopped at Banteay Kdei, a smaller structure that would have been impressive in its own right had I not just walked through whole complexes twenty times its size. And then, we arrived at Angkor Wat, which dwarfed even the largest buildings in Angkor Thom.

Angkor Wat is a huge complex accessed by a large causeway that stretches about 250 feet across a broad moat. The first wall stands on the opposite side of the moat about fifty feet back from the water. Once through the gate in the first wall, a walkway extends through a field for what must be another six hundred feet. There are a few structures in the field, but the central temple dominates the park: three walls encircle five towers that stand, immense, over the flat ground. The Khmers carved several stories into the outer encircling wall in bas-relief. I spent almost three hours walking around the entire area, exploring and taking pictures. It was five o'clock when we started back to town.

I've got another day of temple exploring tomorrow and its about time to sleep. I'll try uploading a few pictures to Flickr tonight and then try to catch up tomorrow.