Days 109-111: Siem Reap, Cambodia

We took a bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, home of the famous Angkor Wat temple complex and Angkor Thom royal city. It’s a 6-7 hour drive even though it’s only 300 odd kilometers, due to the poor quality of the roads and the fact that the bus has to share them with cows, bikes, and a few other cars. We would’ve preferred to take a boat up to Siem Reap, but this being the dry season, decided that getting stranded on a sand bar didn’t sound like much fun. The tedium of the bus ride in no way presages the wonder of Angkor, which astounded and amazed us, despite all we’d heard of it beforehand.

The Angkor area was the center of the huge Khmer empire of the 9^th to 15^th centuries, and in it they built over a thousand temples, palaces, and tombs. The ancient city sprawled over a vast area, the largest preindustrial city in the world, and from it they controlled an area that included most of what are now Cambodia, Lao, Thailand, and Myanmar. The temples vary widely in their current conditions, ranging from the largely pristine Angkor Wat to piles of stones spread across the forest. There’s so much history, art, and religion crammed into this place that your mind goes into overload. And it’s so beautiful that our camera was overwhelmed and keeled over dead half an hour after arrival! There’s plenty of charge in the battery but the camera just won’t turn on… I guess we’ll just have to come back again!

The city of Siem Reap is much more built up than Phnom Penh since most tourists to the country seem to fly directly in, visit the temples, and fly back out. There were two million tourists last year and they’re expecting many more this year. We were quite glad to be here during the quiet season, since Angkor Wat was already quite crowded enough for our tastes! I’ve heard rumors of fifty new hotels being built in Cambodia – and this in a country that may only have 100 hotels total now! The Japanese appear to be moving in wholesale, followed by the South Koreans.

We did the grand tour on our first day and hired a guide to teach us more about the history of the temples, the significance of various buildings, and the myths behind the friezes carved into the walls. We first visited the ancient royal city of Angkor Thom, which still has a giant moat and wall around its 9 square kilometer interior. In the very center of the city lies the Bayon with its many gigantic faces and huge bas relief stone carvings. We walked around quite a bit, visiting the mostly collapsed Bauphon (it was built on a base of sand), followed by the Phimeanakas, Terrace of the Elephants, and Terrace of the Lepers.

We next headed up to Ta Prohm, the site where much of the temple filming for Tomb Raider (the original one) was done. This temple was thoroughly overgrown by shrubs and trees, and while they’ve removed most of the shrubs, they’ve left the trees, which have over the years worked their way over, under, and through what’s left of the temples. The trees and temples combine to create an amazing atmosphere, one in which I’d happily spend days basking.

Afterwards we visited Angkor Wat, the most famous and best preserved of the sites in Angkor. It’s also, unsurprisingly, the most visited, and was mobbed when we were there, although we were happy to see that a large fraction of the mob was Cambodian. We weren’t as enamored of Angkor Wat as we were of many of the other places we visited. Probably some combination of the crowds, our already being tired and sheer sensory overload. We’ll happily go back and try it again to see if we like it more the second time! We ended the day atop Phnom Bakheng and watched the sun set over the ruins.

We spent the next couple days visiting more temples on our own, spending more time on the less visited (and less restored) sites that we found we enjoyed more. The access at these smaller sites is amazing; at some there is no signage, no paths, and no one watching. You can walk through the remains of the temples, around the old walls and moats, down the ancient hallways. We were of course careful not to add the wear and tear on the sites, but you can go an amazing number of places even so. The lessons from our guide the first day, plus a handy guide book gave us the tools we needed to decode a lot of the iconography and religious significance of the sites, but it was really just wandering around in the ruins that gave us a feeling of the former majesty of these temples, how awe inspiring they must’ve been at the time.

Three days was both not nearly enough and the perfect amount of time in Siem Reap. We easily could’ve spent a week photographing it, but three days is great as an introduction. Plus there were many, many more restaurants we wanted to go to! To our surprise, Cambodian food has been some of the best of the trip! We knew nothing of it before arriving and have been amazed by how consistently great it has been. My best description is that it is a more hearty Thai food. Take the same spices and sauces as Thai food, but add potatoes and other starches, cook a bit longer, and serve. But that’s a vast simplification; there is a huge range to the cuisine that we didn’t have a chance to sample or to learn to make. And for that as well we need to go back!