Angkor Thom

This was our first day at the temples. Wow. This temple complex is amazing. The amazing thing is that it’s survived so long. These temples were all built by about 1200 AD, and were semi-abandoned at some point (though apparently modifications happened through the 1700s). I keep using the word 'amazing', but I'm not exagerrating. You will walk around here with your mouth open, wondering if you're making all of this up.

These complexes are vast – this one is a square 3 km on a side. It was built by King Jayavarman VII, as his capital. Each new king seems to have moved the capital slightly – 10 to 30 km one direction or the other. But, this one was so well defended, with an 8m wall forming the entire perimeter, and a 100m wide moat around that (that was populated by crocodiles!) that subsequent kings couldn’t or wouldn’t move it. Since the capital has to have a royal temple in the center, and each king has to build his own, they had to keep modifying Jayavarman VII’s. This temple is called The Bayan, and is a mixture of historical styles (J-VII was an ardent Buddhist, so all the symbology was Buddhist. Subsequent kings were Hindu, so tried to change J-VII’s temple to suit their own religious persuasions.). It’s huge in itself, about 150m square, with a large number of towers that reach 30m tall. Many of these towers have now collapsed, with the stones lying all around, but you can explore most of it. Some portions are roped off for conservation work. Japanese and German archaeological teams are trying to restore or stabilize as much as they can. I talked about the huge painted mural at Wat Phra Kaew depicting various battles. This has something like that, except the entire thing is carved in stone, telling the history of the Kingdom.

Besides the main temple, there is the royal palace, the terrace of the Leper King, the Elephant Terrace (surrounded by bas-reliefs of nearly life sized elephants!) and much more, including one very high pyramid that you can climb at your own risk. The view from the top was... um... amazing!

You can read far more comprehensive details about this and other ruins at Angkor elsewhere, but the main thing is that you should see this as soon as you can. The local town is getting developed in a hurry, now that the shooting has stopped. It will be Disneyland in ten years. It’s already a pretty expensive place to do things, relative to other places we’ve been on this trip (of course, this is all relative. Our air conditioned room is 12 dollars a night. But, a bottle of water that was 5B in Thailand is a dollar here. The tuk-tuks are very expensive.) At some point, someone in what passes for the government will pull his head out of his ass, and rebuild that road – it’s 120 km to the border, and could be a one and a half hour drive if it were modern. There are massive resorts being built all up and down the street, and you can pay anywhere from $3 (non-air-con hostel room) to 700 dollars for a room. The bottom end of the range is heading up, and soon some of the ruins will no doubt be privatized (the admissions are already run by a private company, which spends a whopping 10 percent of revenue on conservation. 75 percent is returned to the Ministry of Finance, where it lines someone’s pocket.)

There’s only one of these in the world, and it’s going away soon. Make the flight into Bangkok, then to Siem Reap. Plan to spend a week – the two days we budgeted weren’t nearly enough. Tonle Sap lake is also right nearby, and is supposed to be a pretty neat boat ride – you can ride down the lake and river all the way to Phnom Penh, and from there on a boat down the Mekong all the way into Vietnam, which I think would make a really fascinating trip.

It’s hot here. A lot hotter than Bangkok, in my opinion. I think it was at least 40 on the stone ruins, and this was my first day out walking around a lot since getting sick. I ran out of gas in a hurry. We managed to look at every thing in the Angkor Thom complex, and go to one other ruin, called Ta Prohm, which was a temple J-VII dedicated to his mother, a few km away (before returning to the hotel about 4PM, where I took a shower and collapsed on the bed.) Ta Prohm is overrun by jungle, and there are lots of trees that are growing through and over the walls. Lots of areas were roped off for conservation work and/or danger.