Angkor Wat

Wow what a day! Slept like a Cambodian log all night and finally headed out with Wonäääh (spelling is mine) at 9 for the Angkor temples. We zipped out there on his moto, at times nudging speeds in excess of 40 km/h. As for the temples: superlative, superlative, superlative, etc. etc. etc. Not really any way of describing it all adequately. The main temple, Angkor Wat, is surrounded by an enormous moat and is pretty enormous itself. Time and the local conditions have taken their toll – these ruins aren’t preserved the same as considerably older ones I’ve seen in Lebanon, Syria, Eygpt, but that probably just adds to the just-been-discovered atmosphere of it all. Many of the bas-relief have deteriorated significantly, but, with hundreds and hundreds of metres of the things, there are plenty that are still spectacularly intact. My favourite experience for the day (other than the cold shower when I got back here), was the Ta Phrom temple, which has been largely left the way it was re-discovered in the 19^th century. Although some of the bas-reliefs from the Bayon temple and its huge faces staring out into the jungle were pretty special too.

It was brutally hot and humid today and this little lilly-white Euro-boy wilted! Realised half way through the day that it wasn’t being helped by some achiness from the tetanus jab I had on Monday. Managed to survive 5 hours of templing before admitting defeat and heading back to that cold shower, which had an immediately effect. About half an hour after I got back to my guesthouse, the rains finally kicked in and it’s still really bucketing down an hour later.

 

What an incredible heritage the people of Cambodia have and thankfully it’s also providing some of them with a certain amount of income. Not in the actual temple areas themselves, but round about, there were many men, women and children, attempting to sell anything and everything relating to Angkor to the heat-exhausted tourists. When one considers the recent history of this country, it’s hard to feel anything other than goodwill towards these people, even if they were at times very persistent! I bought some guidebooks and one or two odds and ends and I’m sure I paid a good rate for them which is only fair enough – no NHS, Medicare, Social Security, AHV etc. here. And considering what the older people have been through over the past 40 years, and the utterly destroyed country that the youth have inherited, one must simply marvel at how generous and good natured everyone seems to be. Hopefully things will keep getting better.

 

Angkor’s heyday was around the 12^th-13^th centuries but there is some building from as early as the 9^th. Intriguing to think that, as the Anglo-Saxon poems I’ve pored over for the last 12 months were being written in Exeter, the Khmer were constructing some of what I saw today. Apparently even Roman coins have been found in other parts of greater Cambodia, showing how far their trading routes extended (both sides!).