Rural Angkor

Siem Reap, Cambodia, has plenty of luxury hotels and upscale restaurants to accommodate well-heeled foreign tourists, but the town of 175,000 and the villages in the surrounding area deliver a distinctly rural experience.

You can still get all the fixin's for a feast at Siem Reap's Old Market.

The moto-remork (a.k.a. tuk-tuk)  provides inexpensive, reliable transportation for tourists and locals.

But the bicycle remains an important work-horse. 

Being soft foreign tourists, however, we hired an air-conditioned car to take us into the country for a peek at
the Beng Melea temple. 

Along the way, we stopped for a roadside snack called ja bamboo.

The vendor stuffs a combo of coconut sticky rice and black beans into bamboo sticks and then roasts them.
Just peel back the bamboo and voila! -- a sweet and savory, protein-packed snack that will provide hours of
fun for the kids. Two sticks for a dollar.

Restoration has been a slow-go at the Beng Melea temple. This is the main gate. You can get in
around the side, but it's a fairly rough experience.

After stumbling among the ruins, the reward is a fine lunch of wild boar, vegetables and rice in the
tidy nearby village

Back in town, you might like to end the day in reflection along the banks of the Siem Reap River.

Revenge of the trees

Here's what happens when you don't clean out your gutters for several hundred years. 

Ta Prohm

Ta Som

Ta Som

Ta Prohm

Angkor artwork

From Angkor Wat.

Virtually anything that could be carted out of the Angkor monuments has been taken by invading armies and relic thieves, but there was no way for them to make off with the bas reliefs and some of the largest statues. The No. 1 recurring image is that of the apsara dancers. Thousands of them line the walls and doorways of every temple. You can see the faces, bodies and poses change slightly over the centuries and across the sites, but this Khmer classical dance is still performed today much as it was hundreds of years ago despite the trouncing it took first by the Siamese and later the Khmer Rouge.

From Preah Kahn

From Angkor Wat.

It wasn't all dance and merriment. There are battle scenes galore, nearly all from the Sanskrit epic "Ramayana." The picture below is from Angkor Wat and stars Hanuman, the great monkey-faced Hindu deity leading his forest-dwelling monkey army against the demon king Ravana, who has kidnapped his man Rama's girl Sita.

From Angkor Wat.

The epic length of the epic Ramayana... fade to black.

Terrace of the Elephants at Angkor Thom.

Unexplained dinosaur on a lintel at Ta Prohm.

One of about two dozen figures lining the bridge across the moat in front of Ta Som. It depicts the Hindu creation myth "Churning of the Sea of Milk" in which the bad gods battle the good gods and whip the cosmos into the froth of the Milky Way. 

Elephant dating from 950 A.D. stands guard above the unfinished temple known as the Eastern Mebon.

Astonishing (really!) Angkor

     Our visit last week to Siem Reap, Cambodia, and exploration of the Angkor temples was hands-down the most satisfying trip we've taken since moving to Singapore. The architectural legacy left behind by the Angkorian civilization (802-1432) is truly astonishing and the hospitality of the people living there today is utterly genuine, at times disarmingly so. One night after dinner at a local eatery, there wasn't a taxi in sight. One of the of the waiters jumped on his motorcycle, rode into the center of town and fetched a tuk-tuk for us. Then he paid our fare back to the hotel!

One of the hundreds of faces keeping an eye on you at Bayon Temple in Ankgor Thom.

     If you've heard of anything about Angkor it would be Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious monument. But there are dozens of other major wats (temples) in the area and hundreds of smaller ones. For me, Bayon stole the show. All the faces portray one man, King Jayavarman VII (1125-1200), possibly the greatest of all the Angkor kings and surely the most industrious. These guys were Hindus back in the day, but Buddhism made solid headway. Our guide said today's Cambodians view them as one religion. It seemed the same way in Thailand.

Main entrance to Bayon Temple.

     Bayon is located in the center or Angkor Thom, which was the main palace or castle for Jayavarman VII. Some claim that during his reign Angkor became the world's largest pre-industrial city. From the size of this place, you've got to think that most Angkorian's were employed building temples. The others undoubtedly concentrated on farming or fighting the of Chams of today's southern Vietnam or the Siamese from today's Thailand. Fun fact: Siem Reap translates roughly into "defeat of Siam."
     Still, you can't go to the Angkor Archaeological Park and not come back with a boat-load of Angkor Wat photos. I will show you three. 

The less crowded and less photographed south side of Angkor Wat, built by Suryavarman II (1112-1152).

View from the top of the center tower at Angkor Wat -- the one in the middle above. You can see the main

entrance in the distance. It was only about 104 degrees that day. 

Now you have to climb back down.

     So, gentle reader, I'm going to declare it too hot to go on today. Check back tomorrow and over the course of the next few days for dazzling Hindu artwork, fascinating Siem Reap street scenes and the ultimate warning to clean out your home's gutters at least once a year. I promise to keep them short. You can decide if they're sweet.

One last benign glare from Jayavarman VII for the road.