Cambodia Day 4

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Today was an open day for me. I hadn’t planned anything definite and when I got up this morning I really didn’t know what I would do. I was thinking that I SHOULD make an effort to hire a guide and go see some of the farther temples an hour or more from the city, but then I asked myself, “What do I WANT to do?” My answer was that I wanted to go spend more time at the Angkor Wat temple. The hotel was very accommodating in giving me a late checkout time and arranging for a driver. I could have gotten a guide, too, but I had been to the temple already with a guide and wanted to wander on my own. Also, I wanted to go in from the west, the way it was designed to entered. My guide took me in via the east gate because it is less crowded, but it’s not nearly as impressive. Sure enough, I was impressed, even though I had just been there two days ago. A group of Buddhist monks were at the temple this morning and I took a photo of them walking among the tourists. I wandered the corridors and spent extra time with the long wall carvings. I was there for two hours and if my testimony is worth anything, Angkor Wat deserves every bit of its worldwide fame. After that my driver took me to a much smaller, older temple called Prasat Kravan. I hadn’t heard of it before, but looked it up on Wikipedia. It was built of brick (rather than sandstone) and has been restored and cleaned fairly recently. It stands in a largely empty field and so looks different from most of the other temples, many of which have trees growing near or within them. And that was the last of the Angkor temples that I saw. On the way back to the hotel, I stopped at Wat Thmey, a memorial to the victims of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. It is now a Buddhist monastery, but used to be a prison and murder camp. Billboards around the grounds tell the story and a stupa (a Buddhist grave memorial) contains some of the bones of victims. It is a thought-provoking place. And now I am back at the hotel and looking forward to my next destination. I’ll be flying there this evening and will report on it in my next blog entry.

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