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Published: January 3rd 2006
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Buddha faces
Faces like these adorn each of the four size of each of the 40 or so towers of the Bayon. October 14: Today we caught our flight to Cambodia. We arrived in Siem Reap and went to the Red Piano Guesthouse, which was the same place we had stayed three years before. The building that used to have the guesthouse now houses only the (expanded) restaurant, and the guesthouse itself is down a side street next to the Sok San Palace. The Sok San Palace is an extremely sketchy Asian businessman retreat of blacklight bar/restaurant, karaoke, disco and massage parlour. Also next door is the Zanzybar, a little bar of note only because our friend Norm hit his head there on our last trip. Over the last three years, tourism has apparently exploded and there are at least five times as many restaurants, bars and luxury hotels full of Western, Japanese and Korean tourists than before. On the plus side, the good places are all still there and all still good, and the street lighting is much better.
October 15: Today we went on our first day of temple-visiting in the Angkor Wat complex. Our first stop was a river and waterfall about 30-40 km from Angkor. It was a nice, though steep and exhausting, hour walk up to the
P and a lion
This lion statue has a smile so big you'd think he was posing for Hello! magazine. top. The ruins there are called Kbal Spean and are pretty unimpressive. Our second stop was the Banteay Srey, which is notable primarily for having very pretty and well preserved carvings. Our third stop was the Banteay Samre, which was OK. We also visited Pre Rup and Ta Som, which is interesting because there is a tree growing out of one of the buildings. It was incredibly hot and humid, and I felt like a wet towel by the end of the afternoon. We had some great Vietnamese food at a place called the Soup Dragon. We had a couple of drinks at various little bars (all on the same street, aptly named "Bar Street") and then hit the hay.
October 16: Today, more temples. Whether by accident or design, we were more or less visiting them in ascending order of coolness. We visited the Bayon, which is my second favorite temple. It has about 40 little towers with Buddha-faces (each a few meters high) carved onto each side of each tower, most of which are still there. Then we meandered through the rest of the buildings and temples in Angkor Thom, which was a walled city of a
Lizard
This guy wanted to go for a ride on the car with us. million people eight hundred years or so ago, with the Bayon in the center. On our way out, we stopped for a minute to shoo away a 9 inch long iguana-looking lizard that had latched on to the outside of the car. At first I tried to catch him in my hat (which I've been doing with assorted geckoes, lizards, frogs, etc that have wandered into our hotel rooms over the past few weeks) but then quickly got the impression that he was (1) way too big and probably toothy and (2) was not excited about being caught in my hat. So we let him make his own way back to the forest. Wanting to see a bit of B-movie history, we prevailed upon Pana the driver to make a detour to the East Gate of Angkor Thom, which was used as a set in Tomb Raider. It has mostly elephants carved into the gate and large Buddha faces as well. There's only a dirt road leading there so there were no other tourists there, for once. This is pretty incredible, since it's massive (about 30 meters high, maybe), beautiful and in rather good shape. I guess it shows that
Ta Prohm
Standing around in the old monastery in the jungle. there are so many impressive ruins around not all of them can make the cut to be on the tour route. Then we visited Ta Prohm, which is my favorite one in the complex. It used to be a monastery, and the jungle has basically grown again in it and through it. In many places, there are trees growing through the walls and ceilings and vines cover many of the walls. Finally, we visited Angkor Wat itself, which is a huge temple with a 20 meter or so high wall/arcade running around the outside and a big central tower in the middle. We walked around the arcade and tried to make sense (meaning, we read the descriptions of each section and tried to find the highlights, like Shiva fighting the Demon King while riding on the back of his Sacred Goose) the Hindu myths that are carved all along it (probably 300 meters of floor-to-ceiling carvings at least) and then climbed the middle tower, which has extremely steep steps and made me a little vertigo-y. Thankfully, they've installed a metal handrail in one place, where non-locals can climb up and down (one direction at a time). At this point we
Moving stealthily through the jungle
P trying to sneak up on a Korean tour group.
were experiencing acute temple fatigue and decided to head home. We had more spring rolls at Soup Dragon to kill some time before dinner.
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