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Published: January 19th 2006
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Angkor Wat:
We flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia and for the last few days I have seen some amazing temples. Angkor Wat is a huge temple and people say it is the biggest in the world. It is all made of mudstone and sandstone, and almost every piece is decorated. You walk on a wide stone road past a moat for 4 minutes to the temple. Inside there is a story wall that goes around the entire temple that is carved it stone. The story wall tells four stories and one is how the gods and evil gods fought. They had a tug of war pulling on a huge snake and all of the animals below the sea got churned up and turned into an elixer of immortality which the gods drank. The temple goes up very high and in the center you have to climb very steep stairs to get to the top. Inside the doorways there are many statues of the Bhudda. The stone snake used for the tug of war and the gods pulling on it is found everywhere.
Another very cool temple is one that has faces of the god-king inbedded in each of the
spires. I think it was called Boran. It also goes very high up and you can see the large faces from far away. In the center there is a gold Bhudda. The rocks they used to build all the temples is very rough mudstone and then it is covered with sandstone. The stone floors don't make any sound when you walk on them and you can hear the crickets from the surrounding jungle. Boran and Angkor Wat were definately the largest and most ornate of the temples.
Another cool place wasn't exactly a temple but is still an old stone thing on top of a mountain. We could have ridden an elephant to the top for $15 but walked instead. When we got to the top there were tiny spires everywhere. We waited for the sunset and I got lots of good pictures.
We went to another temple that was very run down and had huge trees growing on top of the temple stone. It was very long and there were many passageways . Most of them were collapsed. The ones that weren't collpased had lots of detail carved in the rock.
We visited the temples for
three hot days and then went to Phnom Penh by bus. It took 6 hours to get there and the bus was hot and crowded.
Phnom Penh:
Today we took a taxi to the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Once we got there we bought tickets and hired a tour guide to explain the Killing Fields. The Killing Fields are the place were the Khmer Rouge would take people to kill them. They would take doctors, kids, teachers and anyone that was a threat to them. The Khmer Rouge was the communist party of Cambodia who defeated the previous rulers. They were ruled by a man named Pol Pot and they were very brutal. They controlled Cambodia for four years. Thier idea was to turn Cambodia into a country that produced more rice than anywhere else in the world. They starved thousands of people and killed thousands more. Over all, the Khmer Rouge killed two million people, which is one-quarter of thier population.
We saw a Stupa that had human skulls piled all the way up. Some were in order from male to female and age. The monks had dug up the bones and skulls from
one of the mass graves, cleaned them and put them in the Stupa as a memorial.
Past the Stupa there were many mass graves. In some of them they buried 460 people in holes that were only 9 feet deep and 10 feet wide. The killing fields were called Chueng Ek and was unearthed in 1988.
Next to one grave was the Killing Tree where the soldiers beat kids and the Magic Tree which had a microphone in it that played load music to cover up the moans of the tortured people as they killed them.
Overall there is a total of 14,000 mass graves in Cambodia.
The Khmer Rouge wore all black clothes and forced workers to wear black in the heat of the sun.
I thought the Killing Fields were very sad and depressing. I also found it strange because Ive never seen so many skulls.
After the Killing Fields, we visited the National Museum. In the Museum there are statues and other old artifacts from Angkor Wat. We also visited the Palace.
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suzanne northrop
non-member comment
beautiful temples
The temples were fasinating. Pol Pot was incredibly brutal, 2 million people who were trying to help themselves and thier country. Mans inhuminity to man is sometimes mind numing. You are so young to see something so vicious. I read a quote from Anne Frank reciently she said,"Despite the evil in the world I belive in the basic goodness of man". She died in a concentration camp not long after writing that at about 14.