Angkor Wat

This is the largest religious building in the entire world. I read somewhere that with satellite imagery, they are discovering that there are even more ruins hidden in the jungle nearby, but this building itself is the most well known and probably most well preserved in the whole area. This is one of the only noteworthy buildings not built by Jayavarman VII, from the last post. It was built some time later by Suryavarman II (the “varman” means king or leader – they’ve all got it in their name). SII was Hindu, so this is a Hindu temple, but it’s been turned into a Buddhist shrine, with pilgrims coming from all over to pay their respects.

This is one of the odder aspects of traveling over here like this – you are wandering through people’s actual place of worship. The monks we talked to don’t mind – they are happy you’re interested, and even encourage picture taking (with helpful posted guides as to etiquette.) But, still, when you’re looking at what to you is (as Ev says) yet another giant golden Buddha (they really do grow like weeds here), you are stepping around people engaged in worship. I don’t pretend to understand exactly what is it they’re doing, and they don’t seem to mind our presence, but I’m not sure they would tell us if they did. It’s difficult to imagine gangs of loud tourists wandering through your church during actual services. Another thing completely lost in translation.

Anyway, if there were no other ruins in the area, and the admissions were ten times as much, Angkor Wat would still be worth the trip. I was feeling a lot stronger this day (after another day of about 12 hours of sleep, I think the bug has finally cleared my system. Still no interest in food, but I’m addressing the lack of calories with Gatorade), so we got to see everything, and explore many more temples afterwards. Plan on three or four hours at this particular one.

First, walk through the gates, and watch the kids jumping into the moat and going swimming. Then down a long elevated sandstone promenade. Walk the entire perimeter, and see scenes from Hindu mythology illustrated in the famous bas-reliefs. These are in quite good condition, and you can buy books which have a continuous picture of the whole thing – there are 8 different stories illustrated, two per side. One or two might be of historical events, I lost track, but the rest are well known (to Hindu scholars, presumably) myths. That will take you an hour or so. Notice also the apsaras that appear on the exterior of all the columns, facing out toward what was the city. Apsaras are female singing angels of some sort (and now we know where Salman Rushdie got the name of his singing heroine in The Ground Beneath Her Feet – funny how something obscure and exotic sounding can be so mundane if you’re in on the secret. How cheesy would we find it if a western writer had named such a heroine Siren or Angel?) Anyway, they’re all very pretty, and not in such great condition. There is an ongoing German project to restore and conserve what’s left, with signs up everywhere explaining what they’re doing, and how they do it. Much of the restoration work is actually to un-do an earlier restoration project.

A lot of this stuff is made of sandstone, which isn’t so much for longevity – be careful not to lean against or touch anything – you’ll find a little bit of sand on your hand afterwards – you’ve just eroded something. You can also see lots of flaking damage around the bottom of all the columns, where water has run down. I suppose the remarkable thing is that 1000 years haven’t completely erased all traces of human habitation. Turns out an attempt to seal the sandstone in the 1970s only sealed the top layer, allowing water to accumulate in the sandstone behind this layer, eventually accelerating the flaking process.

From Angkor Wat, we had a further intinerary of smaller temples, scattered around the two main complexes. Again, these were very pretty, but by the end, we were starting to fall victim to the Glacier Park syndrome (yawn, another temple.) Day three of your visit would be a good day to go see something else, like the lake, to take a short break from the temples.

We were also getting really tired of the kids that haunt the entrance of all the smaller temples. The big temples have adult salespeople trying to sell you cold drink and so on (unless you’re going to carry 2 or 3 liters of water each, you need to patronize these.) But the smaller temples are left to the kids. These children are often beautiful, and clingy, and really smart. They have a standard routine – they ask you where you are from, then tell you what the capital city is “America, capital Washington d.c.” is a phrase I must have heard a dozen times at each temple. If they are selling postcards, they will they show them to you, naming each temple, then they will count them for you, to prove you really are getting ten postcards for your dollar. Then they will recount, in every language you can think of. A boy, maybe 6 years old wandered up, and counted off 1 – 10 in English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, and one other I couldn’t recognize (Portuguese, maybe). He was beautiful, and a great conversationalist in English. He took me, and a little girl took Evelyn, all around the temple (rather, we wandered around, and they wouldn’t leave us.) Once he figured out I wasn’t buying anything, there was a pause in his patter, then: “Got any candy?”
“No, I don’t have candy.”
“Got any coke?”
“No, no coke either.”
“Pens?” (apparently, they really like pens – if you come, bring a supply of cheap pens and little notebooks.)
“Ummm” (checking my pockets), “no I don’t have any pens.”
“Paper?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe, you could go and buy a coke, and then give it to me."
“No, coke isn’t good for you, candy isn’t good for you.”
(Pause while he processed this) “Coke isn’t good for other people, but it doesn’t hurt me.”

This went on and on – I think Ev’s conversation with her little girl was similar. I gave them both 500 riel, and told them to give it to their parents, and made them promise not to buy candy or coke (this is about 12 cents, and everything here costs exactly one dollar, so I don’t think they would have been able to anyway, but I’m sure the spirit of my instructions were gleefully violated.)

While this pair was charming, the kids at the next place we went to were very aggressive, and while they were basically nice to me, really pissed Ev off. One little girl, on learning we were buying water from another kid and not her, told Ev, “I hope you get sick from your water.” (On inspecting this water, we saw that the seals were broken, so we poured it out.) This was at the very end of the day, and kind of cast a shadow over things. I don’t know why things turned ugly all of a sudden – it was the end of the day, and sales hadn’t been good maybe. Kids were begging on the street later when we searched for a place to have dinner. One little boy walked with me for many blocks, asking for food.

The problem is knowing how to deal with all of this. Was the kid actually hungry? Was he sent out to beg by some adult, and would have taken me to that adult’s restaurant for an overpriced meal? Considering how little these amounts of money mean to me, should I care? Being around this is pretty stressful, and will wear you out. You go back to your hotel and watch bizarrely incomprehensible kung fu movies on your satellite teevee (badly dubbed from Chinese into Thai) and kind of just shudder.