Angkor Wat, Cambodia – A Forest of Temples

Out of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, we took a bus straight up to Siem Reap, Cambodia. We decided to skip Phnom Penh this time. I’m sure it’s a fine city, but it really had nothing specific we wanted to see. The original plan had been to get a bus up to Phnom Penh, then take a speed boat up to Siem Reap. After digging into the details of it all, though, it turned out that a straight bus trip was basically a day faster (doing the boat would have meant staying overnight in Phnom Penh), and 1/3 the cost. So, bus it was. They told us the ride was going to be around 9 hours, but the reality was more like 13 (turns out it was 9 hours to Cambodia, so the travel agency must have just read the wrong line).
In any case, the bus ride was actually quite pretty. Along the way we saw endless rice fields, which may sound boring, but actually it’s not. It’s like… if you see pictures of South East Asia, often those pictures are of rice fields. And you think, “Wow… I’d love to see that some day!” Well, this was that some day! In fact, so much of the trip was rice fields that I dare say more than half the country must be underwater! You’ve probably seen pictures of this by now (ours if not anybody else’s), but rice fields are always flooded when they plant, and for the … beginning parts of the crop at least. I won’t pretend I know the whole cycle, but I at least know that when they plant rice, the fields are flooded, and they stay that way for… a while. Well, Cambodia is… “that way”… right now. I swear you could just about commute by boat across half the country.

Actually, the water turns out to be a significant feature in Cambodian history (according to an article we stumbled across while we were there). Historians believe that one of the things that gave the ancient Cambodians of Angkor such huge power in their time was their mastery of water. They knew how to control it like nobody else. They had canals to move it from rivers to fields, knew how to handle run-off from floods, and had many gigantic reservoirs to store it for droughts. It was that mastery of water that let their civilization get as big as it did. Sadly, it was also ultimately all that control over the water that likely lead to their eventual downfall.
Interestingly, along the way, we also saw a lot of duck farms. It seems like a strange thing to farm ducks, but it must be less strange here. I don’t know if they’re all for food, or if people eat duck eggs or what, but actually saw quite a few duck farms. They’re cute. Basically, people just have some sort of pond on their property, and part of that pond, they have fenced off, and in that fenced off area, they have ducks. Sometimes a fuckload of ducks.

(I know it’s blurry, but that black blob is about 1,000 ducks.  This picture was taken from a bouncing bus.)

So why did we go to Siem Reap? Because Siem Reap is the home of Angkor Wat! Actually, Angkor Wat is just one of MANY temples in an entire protected area called Angkor Archeological Park. There’s no way in hell you could see all of the temples in one day. To help with that, you can buy tickets for 1 day, 3 days or 1 week. We went for the 3-day pass, which works pretty neat. You can use it any 3 days within a week. In other words, when you go for 3 days, they don’t have to be all in a row. Spending a whole day touring through temples can be really amazing, but it’s also quite exhausting. It was nice to be able to take a day of rest in between our touring. Interestingly, in order to prevent ticket theft, or ticket fraud, they actually take your picture when you buy a multi-day pass, and print it right on the ticket. Considering that a 3-day ticket costs $40, I appreciate that they took that extra step to protect us.
In this city, we stayed at a hotel/guest house called “Hak’s House”. Hak is a local guy who runs the place with some of his family. He speaks nearly flawless English. The place itself is GORGEOUS, and has a really beautiful patio where you can sit outside and eat your meals. Like most places we stayed at in SouthEast Asia, breakfast was included in the room price. It’s nice to wake up and know that your first meal (and first cup of coffee) will be no hassle. The patio was surrounded by lovely plants, ferns, bamboo and even orchids. On one side, he had a couple large pots with some lovely water lilies that would open in the morning, and close up at night.
So, getting to the temples, it seems that the way you “do” the temples is to hire a driver for the day, and have him drive you to each temple you want to visit and wait outside while you tour through. Hak had a couple drivers on staff, so we paid them $12 for a day of touring. The temples are spread out so far that it would not be possible to walk them, and even biking would be impractical (especially in the impressive heat and humidity). The vehicle for these rides is a Tuk Tuk, which is an interesting variation on the Indian ones. Instead of being basically a motorcycle with a large back seat, these Tuk Tuks are basically just fancy trailers pulled behind the motorcycle. One nice thing about them is they have really nice, big air-filled wheels, so the ride is very smooth, and all the bouncing is nice and gentle.

Heading back home from the temples one day, we noticed a few amusing things about the town of Siem Reap. The first thing is that I noticed piles upon piles of dirt, sometimes growing up around tree trunks, and sometimes just out by themselves. At first I thought maybe it was leftover from road maintenance or something, but when I looked closer, it reminded me of pictures I’d seen in National Geographic and on the Discover Channel. They all looked like termite mounds! To be fair, I wasn’t certain if they were ant hills or termite mounds, but I suspected termites. Eventually we stopped and walked up closer to one near a temple, and sure enough, there they were.

These mounds were something like… every 2 or 3 meters along the road… on both sides. Each one was around 1.5m tall! So… I’m sayin… that’s a LOT of freakin termites. Each mound had its own chimneys and heat vents and all sorts of openings. They were quite complex structures. Especially after confirming that they were indeed termites, I was kind of flabbergasted; if there were THAT many termites… how could there be any trees left?? I have no answer for that. All I can guess is 2 things: 1) Perhaps not all the termite mountains are occupied. Perhaps we’re just seeing the leftovers of years of termite urban renewal. 2) Jungles grow fast, and they’re used to being attacked by things, and they just deal with it.
The last bit of road-side amusement was that every few blocks, we’d see a road-side stand selling bottles of brightly colored liquid: some yellow, some green. At first we dismissed them and drinks of some sort. They really looked like candy water. But then we saw a giant barrel with some of the same liquid inside it so we looked a little closer. It’s gas (petrol)! This is how they sell gas here (not exclusively, but all over the place in this town at least). Like Vietnam (though not quite as extreme), most folks around here commute by motor scooter. So, they don’t really need a lot of gas at once. Consequently, here come the street side vendors, selling you gas 1 liter at a time. And since we’re selling liters, why not recycle? A lot of the bottles we saw came in old Absolut Vodka bottles. Funny stuff!

Something we saw riding through town was when we stopped briefly to look for a cheap restaurant. We were walking down the street, looking here and there, and Jime looks across the road and sees a sign saying “Pura Vida”! She did a double take and then pointed it out to me. It seemed perfectly normal to see such a sign… until we realized we were in Cambodia, not Costa Rica. Pura Vida was the name of a massage parlor. Just out of curiosity, we walked across the street and asked where the name came from. It apparently came from the Russian boyfriend of the manager, so not even a direct connection to Costa Rica. We just assumed he must have visited and liked the place, and went on our merry way. It seems like a good fit anyway. The climate, and even the plants in Cambodia are VERY similar to home. Some of them are exactly the same. It felt good being there. Seeing Pura Vida on a sign was just a bit ridiculous though.

So, now to the main reason we were here… the Temples! Walking through the temples is like walking through the past. It feels like real exploring. You feel a little like Indiana Jones as you’re climbing up over boulders, jumping over holes, and walking through ancient doorway after ancient doorway, some of which seem like they’re just barely still standing, held up by crutches, and some of which seem like they could easily stand for 1,000 years. Large building stones litter all of the walkways, blocking some paths, and helping form others. The walls are often covered in beautifully-colored lichens and mosses in green, red, yellow, black… you name it. Since the temples have no electricity, you end up walking through a bunch of dark tunnels. Sometimes the tunnels and pathways will take you through a large tower building and you’ll look up… WAY up… to a hole letting in light from the very top.

Coming out of those tunnels, or sometimes just looking through an open window, you occasionally spot an open courtyard where the sun it brightly shining on one of those patches of multi-colored mosses, and it’s like the wall just glows. It can really catch your breath. Many of the temples have been at least partly restored. In some cases, that meant just a crutch or a brace here or there, but in other cases, they’ve taken entire sections of the temple apart, and rebuilt it block by block (presumably after fixing up some of the blocks).

All of the temples are raised up so you have to climb stairs to get to the top. Some of the stairs are so big as to be humbling. Getting up to the top, at times I was literally climbing hand over foot up stairs half a meter high each, yet sometimes maybe only around 15cm (6”) deep after all those years of being worn down by time (and feet). Coming back down at the end was a genuine adventure! Getting up on top of some of the temples though, it’s really incredible to look out over the jungle and just let your already vibrating imagination take over even further, and try to visualize the whole civilization that was here so long ago. Some of the temples let you get so high that you can see what weather is coming your way. On top of one, I saw a few really beautiful cloud fronts. They weren’t quite storms, but it’s still neat to look at them and think… “It’s raining over there, but here I’m dry. I wonder how much longer I have before that will change?” Also, it’s just pretty to look at. I’ve said it before, but I’m a sucker for good views.

Speaking of the rain, we got a really neat experience after seeing this one cloud system. Right after I climbed down from these MASSIVE stairs, and we started heading back out to the road to pick up our Tuk Tuk, it started raining. Only, it wasn’t the usual dark clouds rain. It was the kind of rain that seemingly comes from nowhere, because the sun is still shining bright, and it seems like the sky is wide open blue except for this one little piece. What you get, then, is this incredibly beautiful sunlight, streaming through the tiny rain drops, sparkling like little crystals all around you. It’s barely enough water to get you wet, and yet it’s enough that you can’t take your eyes off it. As if that wasn’t enough for us to enjoy, while that was going on, a herd of water buffalo was driven right up to us, and we got to see them splashing around in these large puddles of water left over from a real rain the night before. That right there added even more to what turned into a really magical little moment. Remember me saying that when you see pictures of SE Asia, you often see images of the rice fields? Well, the other thing you see is Water Buffalo. They are iconic. So, here we were then, in this tiny little freakish, sunny rain fall, already enjoying the moment, and here come all these water buffalo to basically kick the magic into turbo. When you travel, every day has a little bit of cool in it. Some days, though... when things work out just right, you also get little moments of magic. This is why you go. These are the moments that make up your memories.

(The rain started about 3 seconds after this picture, but you have to go to the full photo page to see the best ones)

By the way, the Indiana Jones reference was not an accident. It was here! For Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, they filmed right here at a temple called Bayon, which happened to be the very first temple we went into. It’s one of the bigger, more impressive of the temple sites here, and the thing that makes it especially unique is it is completely covered in faces! The temple is a series of dozens and dozens of towers, great and small, and each tower is covered in 4 faces (one facing each of the 4 cardinal directions (North-South-East-West). With all the towers, and all the other little designs around this temple, they say there are literally thousands of faces here… all of them staring at you like the Rubik’s Cube version of Easter Island.

There was another little terrace thing that also had a lot of faces. It wasn’t so much of a temple, I don’t think, as it was a… maze… kind of thing… where you just walked through from one end to the other (with lots of twists and turns but no way to actually go “wrong” like in a real maze). All along this walkway were a series of faces and relief sculptures with all kinds of different images on them. I have no idea what it was for, but it was definitely neat to walk through… sort of like an ancient art gallery.

Speaking of the 4 cardinal directions, it turns out that MOST of the temples in Angkor are aligned like that. In fact, in a lot of places, you have a whole series of doorways lined up in a row. In some temples, if you go all the way to the center, you can just about see out of the whole temple in any direction, through dozens of lined up doorways. Repeating patterns make pretty pictures. :)
Something else that makes pretty pictures is water. A lot of the temples (including the main one, Angkor Wat) had these really massive moats around them. It’s hard to say if they were for defense, art, or water storage. Either way, there was a LOT of water.

One of the temples had this crazy long walkway over a … a lake, basically. I’d say the walkway was something like… half a kilometer long, and once you start on it, there are no buildings on either side of it as far as you eye can see. So, it was a bit like walking on water through a mangrove forest. Contrary to our experience getting off the boat onto Monkey Island (in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam), this was one plank we were very happy to walk. To make it even better, this was finally a place where the endless touts (people aggressively trying to sell you trinkets) could not reach you. So, in more ways than one, the walk was peaceful and beautiful. Sadly, after all that, the temple at the end of the walkway was nothing particularly special (compared with the rest of the giants anyway), and you couldn’t even go up to it! It was all fenced off. Still the walk in and out of that one was one of our favorite paths.

I mentioned that one of the reasons why that water path was so nice was it gave us a break from the touts. The touts were ENDLESS! Many of them were kids… young kids who were not going to school because they were working selling trinkets. All of them were trying to sell the same basic things: postcards, artwork, bracelets, etc. They were everywhere: on the roads, at the entrances to temples, even INSIDE temples. We are also, by this point in our trip, virtually immune to touts. We don’t hate them and can’t begrudge them too much, but they’re still annoying, so we barely even break stride any more as we walk right on by them. We were doing exactly this, leaving a temple one day, ignoring a guy selling art, when the guy said something that stopped me in my tracks. It was like he had spoken some words of black magic, and his dark art had penetrated my wall of indifference. What he said was “You wanna see a spider?”
It’s like he saw into my soul, and knew the one thing that would make me hear him. Knowing full well that this was a gimmick, which he would charge me to see, I decided to look anyway. If he could impress me, of all people (I’ve been to Costa Rica, man… I am not easily impressed), it would be worth a couple dollars tip. You know what? He did. That was a big… fucking… spider. It was the same kind of Golden Orb Weaver you can see all over Costa Rica, especially in Puerto Viejo, but it was the biggest one I’d ever seen, by a LONG shot, and he said it was not especially big for around here. Yes, he had captured it and brought it into the temple on a branch. So yes, it was a gimmick. And no… I didn’t care, even a little. It was a cool spider! It was also cool, and a bit amusing, the fact of how thoroughly that dude had my number. We took a few pictures, gave him a couple dollars, and went back on our way.

(For perspective, I’m only about 1 foot behind the spider, which is about as big as my face is wide)

Since we did come here to see Angkor Wat, specifically, I should probably at least tell you about that one temple. Angkor Wat is among the biggest, and best-preserved of all the temples here. It is also, obviously, the one you hear the most about, and if you’ve ever seen pictures of the area, it’s always part of the photo set. Probably the most iconic image of the Angkor Wat temple is the 5 towers. The towers represent mountains, with the main tower representing a holy mountain comparable to Mt Olympus in Greek mythology. The best pictures of the place usually come at either sunrise or sunset. So you know what we did? We went to visit at both sunrise AND sunset (…aaaand now all my theater friends have a song stuck in their head. You’re welcome). We started off with the sunset visit, and caught some beautiful shots of the rising moon. We got to wander through the temple first, then headed out back so Jime could catch the temple getting backlit by the setting sun. Out back, hardly anybody was out there, so we almost had the place to ourselves. Sadly, we didn’t get any nice sunset colors, but she did get some really nice shots of the temple, sharply contrasted against the bright sky behind it.

For sunrise, another day, we got there right around 5:30AM. When we left our hotel, it was still pretty much black outside. By the time we got to the temple, 20 minutes later, there was just the barest, faintest hint of light. Perfect! We weren’t late! We were also not early; that is, we were nowhere NEAR the first to arrive. We were actually among the LAST. The place was a madhouse. I’ve never seen so many people get up so early to look at a building! I guess this is the thing to do. Still, we find ourselves a nice little spot in front of a large pond, which let Jime get some really incredible shots of the temple reflecting in the still water in front of us. Some of those reflection pictures are so nice, it’s almost like the reflected image is sharper than the real one! She also got some really nice ones with a planet (I have no idea which one) shining brightly in the last, blue darkness of the awakening sky.

Angkor Wat was definitely neat. It was not, however, our favorite temple there. In fact, it barely made the top 3. Our first runner up has to have been that Bayon temple, with all the faces. Our winner, though, was the one we went to on our last tour day in Angkor, right after the sunrise at Angkor Wat. That temple is Ta Prom. What makes Ta Prom so special is that it is one of the LEAST restored temples around (although they’re changing that right now, which is very sad, but I can understand it). Ta Prom is also set pretty far back into the forest, and this temple, more than any other in this area, seems like it’s been just about taken back by the forest (there’s supposedly another one far away that’s also overgrown like this, but it’s quite a long trek to get there, and we didn’t). When you’re dropped off at the entrance, the temple is set so far back you can’t even see it. You hike down this long path through the forest. On the morning we were there, since we were so early, hardly anybody else had come before us. Consequently, it seems like the wildlife hadn’t … left.. for the day yet. Walking down that path, once we got about half way, we started seeing hundreds of tiny little things jumping out of the way. When we looked closer, only then could we actually make out what they were. They weren’t bugs. They were frogs! Tiny, TINY little frogs, beautifully camouflaged against the ground. When they weren’t actually jumping, your eye had a hard time seeing them when they were right in front of you. Jime actually managed to catch one so we could show you. :)

At the end of the path though, when you first see the temple, you know right away that it’s something special. There are huge strangler figs and other vine-y, sinuous trees, all over the place. Right in front is a HUGE one that flows its roots out like the tree is melting onto the ground.

Walking into the temple (once you get past the construction zone), you are taken into another world unlike even any of the other temples around here. It is… alive. All the walls are covered with many colors of mosses and lichens in red, yellow, green. I know I mentioned that idea before in general, but here is THE one temple that exudes it.  Building stones littering the ground, or tumbled in large piles in a corner, all seem like they’re covered in a fine fur of soft, green moss. Relief carvings of deities and dancers are highlighted in red and yellow mosses as if they were painted.

Ferns grow out of walls in dimly lit corridors. In other places, entire trees grow right on top of walls. Because these are Strangler Figs (Matapalos), they reach out with their roots, like tentacles, and find every little nook and cranny and crevice. In some places it looks like trees are actively jumping a fence. In other places, an incredibly MASSIVE, unbelievably huge tree has wrapped up a whole courtyard like a giant octopus guarding some treasure.

In the center of the temple complex is another massive matapalo (strangler fig). It’s so big, you can see the walls being crushed under its gigantic weight. The trunk is an intricate lattice of interwoven roots. In the center of the mesh, it looks like you can just barely see the shriveled remains of whatever tree came before it, that the matapalo ate for lunch. The weave of roots on the outside are all blended and melted into each other like a liquid. They form this perfect little ladder that makes you feel like if nobody was looking, it would be the coolest thing ever to just climb right on up and say Hi to the chattering parrots at the top. It would be so easy!

It’s that whole juxtaposition of vibrant life growing among ancient ruins that really make this place magic. I know I said something like that before, when I was talking about walking through the Roman Forum. But this one is different. It’s the difference between a single flower in a field of rocks, and a thriving jungle, eating a temple. In Rome, the rocks are winning. Here in Cambodia, the jungle is definitely a few laps ahead, but the game is still going strong.
More than any other post I’ve done so far, while I think I’ve done a pretty decent job of describing the scene as best I can, it’s the pictures here that really tell the story.  I’ve only given you the barest hint of what Jime captured on this trip.  You REALLY don’t want to miss the full photo set.  You’ll find that here:

http://alexjimenartw.shutterfly.com/pictures/2329