Angkor Wat

Going to Angkor Wat for the first time felt a little bit like going to Disney as a kid. It's really expensive, there are toooons of tourists, it's hot as heck--but holy cow is it great. Also like Disney, it's all almost too perfect, like cartoonishly beautiful. Angkor Wat has been called "perfection in stone"--and you get it as soon as you see it. Having been to a few other Angkor-style ruins at Ayuthaya and Phanom Rung, I had a sense for what a really well-preserved, millenium-old temple looked like. Angkor Wat is both much larger and in better shape than either of those, and the prangs are just incredible. Once you actually walk across the moat and up the approach--like most great temples in SE Asia, the length of the approach is directly proportional to the importance of the temple, so this was a pretty long one--you get to the outer walls that surround the 3 main prangs.

These outer walls were what really took me a long time to get over. They're covered in these massive and incredibly detailed bas-reliefs, showing stories from Hindu mythology and Angkorean history. Each wall is maybe 100 feet long, and maybe there are 2 or 3 walls per side of the temple. Every inch of the wall is covered in these bas-relief sculptures. And there are pillars, probably hundreds of them around the complex, each with bas-relief "wallpaper" type patterns--except it's not a stamped pattern. Each little flower in the pattern is slightly different, and there have to be hundreds of flowers on each pillar.

Going along with the Disney comparison, there are also several other temples right around Angkor Wat (no Epcot, thank G-d). Probably my favorite was Bayon. Bayon doesn't give that "wow" factor from a distance like Angkor--kind of rubble-y looking from far away. But you go up close, and there are 54 carved faces (all of the same Angkor-era kind) that give these Mona Lisa-esque look from and to all directions. If you've ever seen the show Legends of the Hidden Temple, I swear these faces were Olmec. Plus you get to climb all of the ruins, which is pretty fun. After that, we went to Ta Phrom, which is a pretty fascinating set too. Specifically, it was the set for one of the scenes in Tomb Raider, haha. All of these massive banyan trees climb over and around the ruins--so neat to see nature reclaiming these temples.

On my second day at Angkor, I mainly just sat at Angkor. There are a ton of other temples in the area, or some a little further afield, but I wanted to soak in Angkor a little longer. Once you've seen each little detail (which you can't really do, but ah well), it's really nice to sit there for a while. The air--while humid and stifling at first--is calm, and I hadn't gotten enough of being that close to one of the wonders of the world in one three-hour trip. So I sat for a while longer. Eventually, a Cambodian English student named Si Nahp approached me and asked if she could sit with me. I figured she wanted to sell me something--everyone does--but she only wanted to practice her English with me, which I obliged her to do for a few hours as we wandered around Angkor and to a few other sets of ruins not too far.

One other thought. A lot of people only go to Cambodia to see Angkor. I was thinking about it, and apparently Angkor is seen as the cultural heart of the country. Struck me as really strange that someone would go so quickly to the heart of a place, especially if they weren't planning on seeing anything else there. Maybe like flying from Cambodia to see the Super Bowl, knowing nothing about football or America. What a strong introduction, but sort of an empty one if it's all that you know of the place. I felt like I was out of place a little bit.

Anyway, after 3 nights and 2 days in Siem Reap (the town next to Angkor), I took a bus down to Phnom Penh.