Siem Reap and Angkor Wat

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Milestone! We've just finshed seeing the temples and are moving on to Phnom Penh in the morning.

We flew out of Luang Prabang on Siem Reap air (subsidiary of Bangkok air - $195) direct to Siem Reap. Nice experience and quite a nice new airport at Siem Reap.

Man it is hot here - it's going to hit 40C which is difficult to cope with. And its not a dry heat.

The taxis here are an excellent sort of motocycle-drawn chariot! Our hotel helped arrange Mr Bun Cheyrith as our charioteer for the temples. We got up early to beat the heat and set out, anxious for our first glimpse as we tooled down the tree-lined avenue.

Wow, It's really good. I took so many pictures that I amazed myself, I just burned another set of DVDs in Luang Prabang, and now the camera storage is nearly all full again! We toured Angkor and a few more of the MANY other impressive other temples in the area. What a complex!

Cambodians are extremely nice people; so were Laos and Thais, but the Cambodians seem to take the cake.

It's difficult to imagine the massive city that would have surrounded these complexes, the wooden buildings and other biodegradable materials now gone just leaving the stone behind. The scale of the area reminded me of Chichen Itza, but larger. The place doesn't disappoint. I guess I should say more, but it's hard to describe adequately. Some places in India had comparable quality of stone carving, like Elora and Ajanta, but here was the whole package - the combination of size, detail, style and surprisingly good preservation. Wow.

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Photos

Don't look down!
The climb up to the central spires

That's terrific bas
Halfway down one of the world's longest bas reliefs. These went around the outside wall of the middle level of the temple, carved in great detail with epic stories

Fierce battle scenes
Hanuman's monkey army in pitched battle with the evil demons of Ravana

Scene from 37 heavens and 34 hells
Clearly this is a hell - the one where they pull the tongue out with tongs

Churning of the sea of milk
The creation story, where the good and evil gods still got along - this is Ravana and the evil gods anchoring one end of the snake god, acting as a rope. In the rest of the scene; the snake is wrapped around a mountain, and the mountain is sitting on Vishnu in giant turtle form, acting as the pivot. On the other end of the snake, Hanuman, Shiva, Brahma and all the good gods are pulling in the other direction. From the churning, out comes the elixir of immortality.

Comments

[Kevin]

Happy birthday!
Hi guys, been following your adventures and fantasizing about not being in central Pennsylvania, and I'm beyond envious. Enjoy the last few legs of the trip and happy birthday, Farah!

[Andrew Douglas]

Whats the chance? One in a million?!!
so i'm sitting at the computer with my girlfriend, Jen, and we need to create a blog site for our travels to Asia (flying out to Bangkok tomorrow). I google 'travel blog' and TravelBlog.com comes up - this seems to be a good match I think to myself.... we surf the site for abit to look around at peoples blogs - lets look at Asia, Camboida (cause thats where we are going!). I scroll down the page, looking at titles and names and come across 'FarahAndJohn'. "Wait a minute i say to Jen, my cousins names John and his wife is called Farah - it couldn't be....?!" And the rest is history :) Hi John and Farah!

[Sergei]

I will be there one day
Farah and John, this certainly THE post I've been waiting for. And it was well worth the wait! I knew a bit about this place (it is still on my list of places to visit), but what you've shared opened a few things I even could not imagine! Now I absolutely proud that I've decided to vote for this place as one of the New 7 Wonders of the World (http://www.new7wonders.com). I cannot wait to see the rest of the pictures from this place and hear more about about your experience...