Angkor Wow
A slightly predictable post is coming, maybe, but essential none the less.
Angkor Wat is astounding. We bought our three-day passes today, the most expensive thing we have bought in over 4 months at $40 a ticket!, and with the help of Leila our tuk-tuk driver, we went exploring.
First stop was the biggie, Angkor Wat itself. It is enormous, god and guidebooks alone know exactly how big, but it took us a good 1 1/2 hours to traverse at a semi-leisurely pace. The enormity of the place is the first thing that gets you, it looks massive from a distance and only gets bigger the more ground you gain on it. That’s the first thing that takes your breath away, the second thing is something much more intricate.
You know when you are in a wood, or on holiday somewhere that has more insets that Britain and you look down and at first you don’t register anything, but then you double take and realize that the whole floor looks like it’s moving with ants? Imagine that, but replace ‘floor’ with ‘huge temple walls,’ replace ‘moving’ with ‘covered with’ and replace ‘ants’ with ‘intricate artwork.’ Finally, delete/replace any other word that no longer make sense.
The sentece should now read thus:
You know when you look at the huge temple of Angkor Wat and at first it looks like it’s made of solid, unblemished stone? You double take and realize that nearly every surface is covered with intricate artwork.
A roundabout way of getting my point across maybe, but we all got there in the end and I’m proud of us.
Seriously, once you get to the temple proper, every wall is covered with bas-relief depictions of all sorts of things. One wall had a runnig battle where vast armies fought for supremecy. The makers of the walls certainly wasn’t Dodgy Dave’s Cowboy Plasterers from Pitsea!
We then moved onto the Bayorn, the next ‘must see,’ it too was amazing. Nowhere near the size of Angkor Wat, although the entire Bayorn complex itself was within the walls of Angkor Tom (lit. Big Temple,) This one had something that was instantly recognizable. It’s main feature was pillars of stone with a buddist face carved into each side, facing to each of the 4 compass points. There was a lot of these in the place, and this, combined with the face that Bayorn was multi-levelled and more open to public viewing, mad ethis a much more photo friendly spot. Speaking of which, I’ve been very lazy with pics recently, I know, but I promise to put some up before we leave Siam Reap, you heard it here first!
Then can another bit of uber awesomeness. Our tuk-tuk guy told us that he would meet us half a mile or so down the road, the idea being that we entered the different temple complex’s that ran alongside. We did, and here the temples were much closer to ruins than Angkor Wat or the Bayon, that’s not to say that they didn’t utterly rock though. They were sprawled out amongst the forrest. Stone giving way to tree, and in some cases, entwining to form an impenetrable husk. The forrest floor led us through a mixture of different sights, and eventually we came to a clearing with a small but high temple in the middle of it. Regular readers may well rememeber my escapades in Koh Tao when I free climbed up a mahoosive rock when Lauren was getting her hair cut, I promised then that I would never be so stupid again.
So there I was, hanging off the side of this temple. They were stairs, once, but now they were nothing more than ridges set off the pyramid face. I climbed to the top, the sign at the bottom of the temple telling tourists to ‘climb at their own risk,’ still enblazoned across my mind. I’ll definately get the picture from the top so you can see how steep it is, in it, Lauren’s unamused face can just about me made out looking up at me.
I then had to climb back down, this gathered a small crowd of people jeering and telling me ‘not to look down.’ Ho-hum.
Tonight we are cream-crackered and so are planning a small meal and then crashing out. We are being picked up at 10 am tomorrow morning to go to the further out temples with a different tuk-tuk , sharing the wealth you know, and we are planning on watching sun set at Angkor Wat.
All these words and I haven’t even glossed our time last night when we went for a late night snack and ended up with me meeting Chet the 26 year old Cambodian security guard who desperately wants a girlfriend while simultaneously Lauren was getting an improptu Khmer lesson by the ladies at the street stall. If all of Cambodia was like Siam Reap, I would find it very hard to ever leave.
Tags: Cambodia, Travel
mikeloken
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