Well, another huge day! Spent the morning looking around what is definitely the most atmospheric temple ruin in these parts then the afternoon travelling a swollen river on a rickety longboat to visit a village on precipitous stilts. In fact, the day has been so huge that I'm going to keep this brief!
The temple is called Beng Mealea and as far as the "just discovered in the jungle" feeling goes, it blows away anything else I've seen over the last few days. An incredible jumble of huge sandstone blocks, with enough of the original architecture intact to give one a sense of just how imposing it must once have been. Hopefully a couple of photos have uploaded successfully!
The village I visited is known as Kompong Phhluk - set up on enormously high stilts to keep out of the way during the wet season (well on the way right now). During the height of the wet, it looks like Venice and during the dry, well - just really quite strange. The trip there and back was rather hair-raising - my driver turned out to be the local lad on the waterways, getting the boat sideways around the corners and narrowly missing a head-on collision due to having spent a little too long leering at one of the local beauties. Came across a monk giving English lessons to some children in the village and stopped for a while with them - when he heard I was an IT person, he scurried off inside and came back with a laptop. He wanted to use it to write Microsoft Word documents to use in his English lessons so I attempted to give him a crash course on the basics! We parted after exchanging email addresses and with me promising to try and find him a tutorial book or program that might help.
Have been sampling some more local specialities - more details to follow!
No comments:
Post a Comment