Cambodia Day 2: The Small Circuit of Angkor

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It was SO early when we woke up -- 4am.



In the empty lobby was a father daughter combo who were seeming a bit frantic. I guess they had booked a guide for today and he was a no-show.



We had also booked a guide to take us around to the "small circuit" which are all the main temples in Angkor. The father was a bit...intense. You could just tell. They asked if they could join us and pay for half (the guide was only $30 total for the entire day...) so of course we let them tag along.



We learned later the father duo was from Washington DC. The father was Chinese but had been living in America for 20+ years and his daughter was our age and graduated from college the same year we did! She is currently working in China at a fashion magazine, so they met here to do some casual Southeast Asia touring.



In the dark we tuk-tuked along and picked up our Guide on the way. He was a local Cambodian man, but spoke English pretty well with a heavy Cambodian accent.



We arrived at the main temple which is known for being the best spot for sunrise. The same temple that was empty by 6:30 last night was not PACKED with tourists.



We waited around for a couple of hours waiting for the sunrise colors to shine above the grand Angkor Wat temple. Before starting the 2 hour tour of this one temple, we wanted to get some sort of food in us...I think our hostel was supposed to pack us a breakfast box to go, but we didn't see anything waiting for us circa 4am. We wandered past all the children selling scarves, paintings, coffee and walked into what looked to kind of be a restaurant? The quickest thing we could find were BBQ potato chips. They don't really eat pastries or bead of any sort here...

Chips for breakfast it is !



With our snack in tote, we started the tour...



We were at this main temple for about 2 hours as our guide told us the story of the temple, and the meaning of the ancient carvings on the corridor walls. Angkor Wat is famous for having over 3,000 "aparas" or heavenly nymphs that are carved into the walls. The level of detail within this temple is truly amazing. There are also "nagas" throughout which are 7-headed snake figures said to represent prosperity and the spirit of the land and water of the Khmer people of Cambodia.



Built between A.D. 1113 and 1150, and covering an area of about 500 acres, Angkor Wat is one of the largest religious monuments ever constructed. It was originally built as a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Vishnu, but was converted into a Buddhist temple in the 14th century, and statues of Buddha were added.



The temple was engulfed by the jungle for hundreds of years, and although the Khmer people knew of the temple, westerners weren't aware of its existence until explorer and writer Henri Mouhot popularized it in the west. In the mid-19th century Mouhot brought back sketches and writings of the great Angkor temples. Mouhot, like a few Westerners before him, found it hard to believe that the Khmer people built this temple, and in his writings he mistakingly dated it to around the same era as Rome.



These lost temples were buried in the jungle for so many years it's truly magical that today we can wander in and around them all! In fact, the one and only place to escape the beating sun of Cambodia is within the temples! One fun fact our guide told us was that over the hundreds and hundreds of years, so many bats took refuge inside the temples that a HUGE layer of bat secretion grew almost two feet deep. he told us that because if their diet, the bats have extremely acidic poop and if we looked at the bottom of each column lining the hallways, we would see that up to about a foot of each sandstone column has slight disintegration from the bat poop piling up ober hundreds of years!



The temple didn't feel crowded at all. It's huge enough that you really don't see any other tourists unless you are out front taking the classic Angkor Wat photo, or climbing to the top of the central tower (which was amazing). Its 213-foot-tall central tower is surrounded by four smaller towers which is said to be a recreation of a famous mountain in Hindu history.



The stairs up to the top are extremely steep, but the views are very worth it. When you reach the top, you notice that many of the Buddha statues are head-less. We learned later that during the war (1975-1979) people would sneak into the temples, cut off the heads of the Buddhas, and re-sell them on the streets. It's sad to think that these statues had been in tact for thousands of years, and that in our own recent history they were vandalized. Our guide was explaining that people were just so poor at this time, while Cambodia was in shambles, and these huge stone heads were worth a lot, and yet at the same time, they were light-weight enough to steal away from the temple in a backpack.



After our decent down from the highest point of Angkor Wat (on a very steep but "updated" staircase of wood and metal...) our guide told us about how up until 2011 visitors were allowed to climb up the ORIGINAL stone staircases throughout Angkor Wat...They still have these, but most are blocked off due to their completely vertical angle and lack of hand railings ! He told us that around 2011, a woman fell down the stairs and died, and only last month another person fell down the exact same stairs we just climbed, and left in critical condition ! He said that case was very hush hush and even the workers at Angkor wat did not know about it. He only knew it happened because one of his best friends was there and saw it all happen ! I'm very glad he told us these stories after we came down in one piece...



The building of Angkor Wat was an enormous undertaking that involved quarrying, careful artistic work and lots of digging! It's mind boggling to think that before cars, before cranes, before steel, the ancient people of the Khmer Empire constructed such a magnificent and MASSIVE temple compound.



We even spotted a few monkeys enjoying the sun on top one of the ancient walls! After the main temple we headed back to our tuk tuk -- They wait for you outside the temples and just take you from place to place and you pay them about $15 at the end of the day.



As we walked in the shade back to our tuk tuk, somehow the Cambodian genocide was brought up in conversation. Our guide was willing to talk about it pretty openly...He said that his mother had 7 children, but now she only has three. 4 of his brothers and sisters were killed or died in the genocide...It was so heartbreaking hearing such a first hand story from a man who up until this point has been so positive, cheery and seemingly happy-go-lucky. He was born only 5 years after the war ended, and even still, whenever it is brought up, his mother instantly cries just thinking back to that terrible time. He told us that now Cambodia is a democracy, but still has a king and queen who seem to be primarily just figures of the monarchy. Similarly to other places, there are quite a few different parties, but only 2 primary parties that run the country, similar to the republicans and democrats of America.



Throughout all of the temples, you will see occasional piles of stone and rubble -- clearly pieces of the temples that have not yet been restored. We learned that different countries and governments support restoration projects for each of these temples. Ta Keo was a good example of this. Much of the temple was still in poor condition and disarray, just waiting for someone to fund a restoration project !



Next we headed to Angkor Thom, "Great City". Famous for the Bayon temple in the center of the "Great City", Bayon has 264 faces carved into 66 towers within the temple, it was a much smaller temple compound than the large temple of Angkor Wat, but this one of my favorites. Built after Angkor wat in the late 12th or early 13th century, our guide was telling us that the King at the time insisted on having the faces carved to resemble himself.



Within the Bayon temple were carvings and places where statues once stood. It was very interesting because both here as well as in Angkor Wat over the years the kings and rulers went back and forth between Buddhism and Hinduism. Because of this, the statues and carvings were always changing over the years. One may have originally been a depiction of Buddha, but later converted to a Hindu God. Some carvings at the temples were still blank and had clearly been "erased" by one ruler, but never replaced by either a depiction of Buddha or a Hindu god.



Our guide said this went back and forth for hundreds of years and even today, most people in Cambodia are kind of half Hindu half Buddhist but call themselves "Buddhists".



We were starting to get pretty toasty in our temple wear (pants and long sleeved shirts) -- the heat index today was 115 degrees EEK !



Next was a temple made famous by the Hollywood film Tomb Raider with Angelina Joulie -- Ta Prohm. A few of the tomb scenes were filmed here and I can see why ! HUGE banyan trees have grown over the ruins of the temple to create a magical contrast. The trees just look like they are growing straight out of the temple -- like they have been growing for hundreds and hundreds of years. According to our guide, no one even has a guess for how old these trees are.



Because it was one of the most visited temples, there were wooden pathways throughout -- covered in a layer of sandy dirt, making them very slippery !



I was stepping up onto one of the wooden planks, and my right foot completely slipped out from under me, causing my left shin to SLAM into the edge of the wood. It hurt sooo badly, and I think I have a pretty high pain tolerance...Right away my shin/ankle swelled up to the size of an egg. It literally looked like I had an egg under my skin. The pain hurt at first then kind of faded and Lauren and I took a quick photo, but then when I tried to walk it hurt SO badly. Not exactly when I bared any weight on it, but it was more like an aftershock that hurt terribly.



Thankfully this was our last main temple because I knew it would hurt too badly to walk a ton more...



The group sat with me in the shade of the temple (the only place to escape the scorching sun) and then we walked back to our tuk tuks.



We were going to stop at one more smaller temple and I waited in the tuk tuk with our driver becuase it hurt too much to walk.



It was funny waiting in the tuk tuk area. All the drivers were clearly bored, so they kept coming over and looking at my leg and talking in Cambodian trying to diagnose me.



Our driver was so nice -- He drove like a minute down the road and brought back some tiger balm to put on it. This is their go-to for any ailment. We first noticed this at the Spicy Villas when Samart told us to put tiger bomb all over our elephant rash and mosquito bites ... A different approach than in America !



After this last temple it began to sprinkle rain and we headed back to the hostel for a little nap. Afterall, we had been awake since 4am and it was now 2pm !



Heng, our adorable tuk tuk driver, made an executive decision to stop by the pharmacy for me to get something to help my leg. It was very sweet of him, though I didn't know exactly what would help this situation. While in there we also got some hydrocortisone cream for our elephant rash that was STILL thriving (to an extent where it looked terrible for us to show our legs in dresses or shorts)



We conked out for our naps and assumed we would wake up on our own after a couple hours, but I guess we were wrong. We slept until almost 6:30pm ! Shows how exhausting it is to walk around temples in 115 degree heat...



Our hostel bar has happy hour (2-for-1 $3 cocktails and 50 cent beers!) until 8 so we decided to go try to make some friends before dinner. We met a nice guy from the states (rare!) whose wife is in Phnom Phen working. He has been to Southeast Asia a few times but never made it to Angkor wat so decided to take a short weekend trip up to Siem Reap.



He had some very interesting stories and has clearly traveled a ton -- I was very envious.



Since he was by himself we asked him if he wanted to come to dinner with us. We had looked up a place a little off the beaten path but just down the street from our hostel. Hoping this would be tastier Cambodian food than our first night, we walked over there with our new friend Dan.



Sure enough, just our luck, the entire place is EMPTY. We are their only customers.



We told Dan it's probably good that he came with us, because our entire trip has been like this -- just Lauren and I with no other humans.



It was great exchanging travelers' stories over curries served in coconuts.



We told him about all the people who have weirdly taken photos with us and he definitely had a story to top all of ours...When he was at the Taj Mahal, an Indian family walked up to him and handed him their baby. They then proceeded to take a photo with him -- The entire family, with him in the middle, holding their baby !!! We were just cracking up picturing this. He said he did some research and asked some locals, and people basically go back to their small towns and say "look! we made a Westerner best friend--Clearly we are very close, he's holding our baby!"



So exhausted from our long day of temple-wandering, we called it a night relatively early. Tomorrow we were going to meet up with some of our UCSB friends who randomly would be in Siem Reap at the same time as us !

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