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Published: January 22nd 2010
So much for the dry season! As we were coming back from our visit to Angkor the rain started in earnest after threatening with drizzle all day. We agreed with Snai that if it was raining in the morning we would scrap the sunrise visit to Ta Prohm and instead head out after breakfast. We had really been looking forward to the early morning adventure but sure enough it was raining at 530 when we were up and ready to head out. Any rain in the dry season is welcome here and it really didn't put a dent in our plans so no worries!
Snai picked us up and off we went to Ta Prohm, the temple where Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones Temple of Doom were filmed. It is a maze of beautiful temple walls overgrown by the silk cottonwood trees and the strangler figs that wind their away around the bigger trees. It rained on and off but tropical rain is just not much to complain about other than messing up the light in my pictures. 😊 There is a bit of restoration happening at the temple so we were steered away from the main path and at
one point+ realized we had seemingly lost everyone around us. It was sweet. We found ourselves standing at the base of an enormous tree that had scaffolding reaching from bottom all the way to the top and huge chunks of tree lying at the bottom having been trimmed at some point. What a job! The tree had to have been 200+ feet tall. I'm sure the Cambodian OSHA department oversaw the construction of the scaffolding and the safety of the men going up it.
To wander around Ta Prohm is to walk in a wonderland from an ancient time. It is such a maze that Todd and I lost each other for a while - there are long hallways whose sides open to beautiful courtyards filled with the rocks that have tumbled from higher up. The Cambodian version of a pot shard are 1000 lb intricately carved blocks that lie everywhere you walk. Each building and wall seemed to have a beautiful tree growing around it, simultaneaously threatening to bring the wall down and acting as a cast to hold it up. It is every bit as aesthetically enjoyable as we had heard.
While I sat and waited
for Todd to reappear I had the chance to do some good people watching. There aren't many Americans here but many other parts of the world are coming in droves - the French and Chinese seem especially well represented, especially in the big tour bus genre. I heard very little English being spoken as the human parade wandered by. I was encouraged by the sheer number of people visiting this tiny little part of the world - instead of being aggravating, for the most part I am able to feel a sense of happiness that Cambodia has a steady stream of employment in these temples. Tourism is a double edged sword, of course, but if it lifts any number of people out of poverty and provides more opportunities for the next generation of Cambodian kids, well, hopefully the good outweighs the bad at the end of the day.
After Ta Prohm we hopped in the tuk tuk and Snai took us up to the storied Banteay Srai (Citadel of Women), a temple so beautiful, they say, it could only have been created by women. It is different in its use of pink sandstone and deeply carved bas reliefs. A
much smaller temple, when even one tour bus came you could feel overcrowded...I was thankful that only one came while we were there. There is a lovely exhibit at Banteay Srai that describes the construction of the temple, the stories that accompany the carvings and the history of its discovery by a French expedition in the Cambodian jungle back in 1914. So much work has gone into reconstructing these temple jigsaw puzzles, and because the materials are all so tough - so long as not much was looted they have all the pieces and merely have to put them back together (not to oversimplify of course). what I mean is that not much new or foreign material has to be used in order to have a temple look the way it did back when it had originally been constructed. The results are stunning.
After lunch in the tuk tuk we decided to head back towards town and asked Snai if there were any temples along the way. He said there were two that he would bring us to but first he had to stop at his aunt's house in the sugar palm villiage to pick up sugar for his
mom to sell at her stall in the market. We had passed through the villiage on the way to Banteay Srai and it's different than other villiages we had seen because each house had an earthen oven out front and a giant cauldron on top, billowing white steam. Every house had one! You can't ask questions of your driver in a tuk tuk as you're going because he is driving a motorcycle and you're back behind him but now we were able to find out what all of that witch's brew was about. Each house also has a little stand where baskets, wood crafts and food are sold, just a table full of little things to buy. He showed us the ladders used to get to the top of the palm where a piece of the tree is cut and boiled in the big pots. It is boiled down into a yellowish paste that is then scraped and either sold in nuggets or pressed into beautiful palm leaf packaging and sold at the market. He gave us a piece to try and it's delicious! It has a bit of a carmelized sugar taste and a somewhat hard but crumbly texture
to it. It was fun to hang out there for a while - his aunt and family were all there hanging out, 3 adorable little kids melting my heart (the kids here, predictably, are unbelievably cute and I'm going through withdrawal)...
On we went further down the road, past houses and fields, no electricity up this far not surprisingly, chickens everywhere, Johnny Walker bottles full of gas every 200 feet or so, giant trucks zooming by on a too-narrow road filled with cattle, charcoal, people... We stopped again along the way and Snai took us over to a spot where a charcoal oven had been built into an old termite mound. He wasn't sure the details of how it worked and was talking to the girl who lived in the house that had it. They put big wood in the center of the oven (big meaning 4-5 inches in diameter) and slow cook it. the mound is sealed off except for a few vent holes and a bigger hole in the back where a small tester stick can be used to tell if the contents of the oven are ready to come out. It was interesting - he said
that this is just another way people are trying to subsist, that many of the big charcoal ovens had been shut down by the Forestry department but people could still have small ones. He said that the girl had said that the Forestry department was also starting to harass the people with smaller ovens as well. So much of the land was clear cut during the wars that some serious management is needed in order to go foward. He said there is some corruption, not surprisingly, in the Forestry department and while these people just trying to get by are being shut down, large scale logging and charcoal operations continue to exist if the right amount of money is paid off.
Anyway, another peak into the lives of rural Cambodians.
On we went and stopped at a temple called East Mebon which was built on an island in the middle of the East Baray, a giant reservoir that was built back in the time of the temples. The reservoir no longer holds water (it is rice fields now) so you have to use your imagination. The only way to get to it back in the day was by
boat. Now you just have to negotiate the tricky waters of kids trying to sell you books, bracelets and trinkets. We glanced at our guidebook and saw that this temple, as rated by Travelfish, only gets a 3 out of 10. You should see this thing, it's huge, gorgeous, well preserved and very few people come to visit it. It is guarded on two levels by elephants on four corners and they're in remarkably good shape for being more than 1000 years old. Only in a place so rich in temples would something like this be almost completely overlooked. Anywhere else in the world it would be a masterpiece.
Just down the road from East Mebon is Pre Rup, one of the taller temples in the neighborhood and from the top it's a stunning view over the trees as far as the eye can see. Again, deserted. Not on the A-list of temples that most people visit. It was awesome.
We came back wiped out and having had a fantastic day. Cambodia is such a fantastic place, and these temples! They are so unreal. Many rocks were moved a long way by many people. Amazing what happens when
one is not glued to the TV. 😊
We finally wandered down to 'Pub Street' for dinner, an amazingly hip and happening corner of Siem Reap. It is in perfect juxtaposition to the rural countryside not 5 miles away. Many tourists, enjoying 50 cent Angkor beer in a see of neon lights, trendy restaurants and spas. It's almost more than the brain can handle after being in the 'real' Cambodia all day. But it was fun to sit and relax and people watch on a beautiful evening. Finally got to try the fried ginger and had more amok, my favorite dish so far. Todd was asleep by 8 and I wasn't far behind. Do we know how to party or what!?
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Rene
non-member comment
wow
looks just like the National Geo you were showing us. A-F-ing-MAZING! We are snowed in, well, damn near! ENJOY....