The Churning of the Ocean of Sweetened Condensed Milk (Siem Reap & Angkor)
The Angkor ruins are a HUGE series of buildings (mostly Hindu/Buddhist temples)constructed between the 9th and 15th centuries AD. They were built by the Khmers when they were at the height of their power and their empire encompassed most of southeast Asia. To give some idea of the scale involved, the whole city/complex of Angkor covered around 1000 square kilometres at its peak (yes, 10^3. I didn’t just add a 0 by mistake) and included individual temples whose dimensions could be measured in kilometres, as well as huge resevoirs up to 2 x 9km in size.I’d been to the Angkor temples in 2004 with my parents, but Sarah hadn’t visited them before. And if one is in mainland southeast Asia, there is no other more “must visit” a place, no more “must see” an attraction than Angkor.
In the name of simplicity, I won’t bother going into great detail about every temple we visited and every carving we saw. I’ll just give a brief summary of how our visit to Angkor went, and then just let the photos do the talking.
Carvings on one of the Elephant Terraces in Angkor Thom
Day 1: Arrive in Siem Reap. Wander around in wonder at how much the place has changed since 2004. So much develpment has happened that it’s virtually unrecognizable.
The Siem Reap River. It was little more than a muddy drainage channel when I visited in 2004.
-Find our way to a guesthouse (there are dozens… perhaps hundreds in Siem Reap) before going out for a wander around town and a late lunch at a fun local restaurant.
-Shrug off the dozens of tuktuk drivers attempting to get us to commit to touring the temples with them in the following days.
Day 2: Wake up and chat with a few tuktuk drivers before finding one who seems nice, speaks pretty good English and isn’t too pushy. Agree to the plans, destinations and price for the next three days of temple viewing. Head out to the ruins, buying our tickets ($40 for 3 days… expensive, but still cheaper than, say, Petra) on the way in.
-Reacquaint myself with the kids selling souveniers, postcards, water, etc. They aren’t quite as persistent as I remember, but they’re still plenty clingy, and can still count to ten in the language of, and recite the basic demographic and political statistics of any major tourist nation (I eventually stumped them by claiming to be from Trinidad and Tobago.)
-Spend all day visiting major and minor temples by tuktuk. Ban, our driver, would drop us off at a temple, we’d wander around for anywhere from 10 minutes to 1.5 hours, and meet him back near the entrance for the trip to the next one.
Tax free gasoline, smuggled in from Thailand was for sale at setups similar to this everywhere in the country. I suppose glass liquor bottles DO make a durable container of known, consistent volume… I asked Ban about working as a Tuktuk driver in Siem Reap. Apparently he rented his tuktuk for about $2.50/day, and spent about $3/day on fuel, leaving him with a pretty small profit margin on the $10/day we paid him… at least he didn’t have to pay a commission to a guesthouse or travel agency since we contacted him ourselves.
Day 3: Head out to some of the more distant temples in the morning (ones I hadn’t visited before!) Return to Siem Reap to escape the heat from 11:00 to 14:30. Have a quick visit to some more temples in the main complex before heading to the popular hilltop Phnom Bakeng temple to watch the sunset and the last rays of light on Angkor Wat.
Day 4: Our last day at the temples. Ban meets us at 04:45 in front of our guesthouse and we head to Angkor Wat itself (Angkor Wat, though commonly used as a name for the whole complex, is actually just the largest and most famous of the many Angkor temples.) There wasn’t much of a sunrise, but at least we got to visit Angkor Wat before it was overrun with tourists as it often is. We let Ban head home straight after dropping us off, and spent the rest of the day walking around the interior of Angkor Thom (the huge walled area that contained the highest concentration of temples) on foot for the rest of the day. Meet up with Ban at around 16:30 for the trip back to Siem Reap.
Day 5: On the road again… After a big night out on Siem Reap’s “Pub Street” we were woken at 07:30 by the hotel manager telling us that our bus was waiting outside. Somehow I’d turned off the alarm without noticing. Threw all our posessions into packs, and rushed downstairs, having only kept them waiting about five minutes. Spend 6 long, bumpy hours on the road to the Poipet border, then 5 smooth, pleasant hours travelling from there to Bangkok, where we’d first touched down in southeast Asia 10 days before.
And now onto the good stuff:
The approach to Preah Khan, the first temple we visited.
Giant jungle trees growing up above Preah Khan
Horse/person/llama shaped statue and the central island in Neak Pean, our second big temple. Unliek many of the others, which rose high above the ground, Neak Pean’s beauty came from the ponds and lush gardens that surrounded it, and for the ingeneous hydraulic system that fed the ponds via zoomorphic water spouts
Gotta have my bug pics! We saw this scorpion at Banteay Prei. Though only 100m or so off the main tourist trail, this temple was small and received few (human) visitors (For Janet, who just loves arthropods of all sorts ;))
Sarah playing elephant with the statuary at Ta Som
Looking over the guardian’s shoulder, also at Ta Som
What on Earth is this carving at Ta Prom temple supposed to be of? Is this proof that man and dinosaurs co-existed at one point?
Sarah and I at the Ta Prom temple. While it has had some tidying up to ensure the safety of visitors and the temple, Ta Prom has been left as close as possible to its natural, jungle-overrun state.
An Apsara dancer on the wall of Banteay Kdei. Carvings like these covered beams, columns, even entire walls of some of the temples.
The Sras Srang ghat (I doubt you’d call it that in Khmer, but I know the word in Banlga, so it’ll do) and a large man-made pond
Our second night in Siem Reap we went out for dinner at the same local restaurant we’d eaten lunch at a day earlier. It had transformed itself from a quiet eating establishment to a giant rowdy beer-hall, where we got sucked into joining big table of Vietnamese tourists in Siem Reap for a corporate retreat-holiday-party type thing.
Me at Preah Ko. We started our second day at the temples with a visit to the Roluos group (three temples about 20km southeast of the main complex near a town of the same name)
Bakong, the largest of the Roluos group. Like a few other temples at Angkor, this one was still in use as a Buddhist Wat, and had had structures (not visible in this picture) added to it right up until recent times
Beautiful rice paddies and countryside near Lolei temple. I’ve always been amazed at the fact that modern day Khmer people live in and amongst the huge, ancient temples of Angkor
Three Apsaras (female spirits of clouds and waters) at Chao Say Tevada temple. It was amazing to see what the efforts of a Chinese restoration teem and three years time had done to this temple. It was little more than slightly organized rubble during my previous visit, and was returned to a level that must have approached its original glory by the time of this one
Sarah climbing the steps at Ta Keo. Ridiculously high, steep (especially for ancient Khmers who were much shorter than us) steps like this were a common feature of several Angkor temples
Angkor Wat at sunset from Phnom Bakeng. Note the quincunxial formation of the temple’s towers. I love that word. Quincunxial. Unsurprisingly, the last time I got to use it in my ‘blog was my previous visit to Angkor
Tourists at Phnom Bakeng. While many of the smaller temples were entirely devoid of visitors, the most popular three or four were jammed with tourists at various times of day
Monkeys at Angkor Wat. There was at least one BIG troupe of very tame macaque monkeys in the central Angkor area. So often were they fed by visitors that some of the monkeys were overweight to the point of being obese (I’m talking ROLLS of fat on them)
Detail of Angkor Wat Bas Relief. This is just a tiny portion of the hundreds of metres of fantastically detailed bas reliefs carved on the outer galleries of Angkor Wat. The most common theme were battles between gods and demons, but human conflict, and the greatness of Khmer monarchs also featured
A god holding a naga while Churning the Ocean of Milk. A series of these guys formed the balustrade for the Angkor Thom entrance causeway. (The Churning of the Ocean of Milk formed part of the ancient Khmer creation myth. Vishnu arranged for hundreds of gods and demons had a tug of war with a naga (giant serpent) as the rope. At its centre, the naga was wrapped around a “spoon” which spun about in the primordial Ocean of Milk, thus producing the Elixir of Imortality. Condensed Milk, meanwhile, featured in many of the delicious Khmer cold drinks we enjoyed while in Cambodia, including fresh fruit shakes and iced coffee. Yum! Thus, the title of this post.
The wall of one of the Royal Terraces near the centre of Angkor Thom. Note the naga at the bottom-centre. I have a fondness for these seven (or more) headed sea-serpents, which kind of puts me at odds with my mom, as nagas and garudas are mortal enemies.
More of the Royal Terraces. Incredibly, these figures were carved, then entirely covered over by a later construction. The structural layers between the two facades have been removed so visitors can now appreciate them both!
There are 173 of these huge faces adorn the towers of the Bayon, probably the second most famous of the temples in Angkor. They are meant to represent the god Lokesvara
Face of Lokesvara in the Bayon. From the ground they’re impressive enough, but upon reaching the inner sanctuary, they’re amazing, bewlildering, almost. Wherever one looks, one of these serenely smiling visages is staring back
Hey, it can’t ALL be about temples: Our final night in Angkor at the Angkor What!? late night bar… it was a pretty entertaining place 
Tags: Angkor, Cambodia, Llew Bardecki, Siem Reap
