Cambodia: Feb 17: More Angkor Sites

Wednesday was a long day, beginning at 5:30am and ending at 9pm. We awoke so early to see Angkor Wat at dawn; we ended so late to see a Cambodian dance performance. In between, we saw many temples. Again, I documented this day with nearly a hundred pictures (yet I wish I took more). Di Yin also took many. The latter link goes to the first picture from this day (picture #233) in her album from our trip to Singapore and Cambodia. When you see a picture of women in the back of a pickup truck (picture #325), you've reached the next day's pictures. I'll link to those pictures in the next post.

Watching the sun rise at Angkor Wat wasn't as impressive as I was led to believe it was going to be. Frankly, watching the sun rise behind any structure, which makes it hard to see anything but silhouettes, makes for pictures that hide many of the features that make a place interesting. The only picture I really like from the morning looked westward.

After dawn, we returned to our hotel for breakfast, then departed again at 9am for more adventuring. We explored a few temples, including Ta Prohm, also known as the Jungle Temple because it was taken over by huge trees and forest. While most of the forest has been trimmed back / cleaned up, some huge trees were left because they've grown through the walls and buildings such that removing them would cause a collapse. I'm glad some trees are left; I love the atmosphere they lend the temple. Something about the decrepitude of it appeals to me.

For lunch, we were deposited at the restaurant Borey Sovann, where we had another decent meal. After lunch, rather than let our guide drive us back to our hotel (as he suggested), we decided to explore downtown Siem Reap and have him pick us up there for our mid-afternoon and later activities.

We wandered around the Old Market (Phsar Chas) and the touristy center of Siem Reap. The Old Market, which has both food for locals and retail shops for tourists, is big, and most people in the retail section are foreign. The food market is much like food markets in Shanghai, just with more flies. The retail section is also like tourist markets in China in that there are many identical stalls selling identical goods.

When our guide picked us up again, he took us to see more of Angkor Thom. We first stopped to browse the reliefs on the outer temples surrounding Bayon and to see the temples nearby. The reliefs cover a surprising variety of topics, as I discussed in more detail in my overview post. We then drove a little farther and walked along two famous carved terraces, at the same time glimpsing yet two more temples through the trees.

We also stopped by a small exhibit on how the Angkor temples are being restored. Restoration is made harder because they need to find stone of the same color and properties as stone already there, and the only source for this stone that they discovered is near the former base of the Khmer Rouge, a heavily mined region.

After the terraces, we headed to Phnom Bakheng, a temple at the top of a hill, to view the sunset. We hiked up the hill along with hundreds of other tourists. We actually went down the hill before the sun turned a brilliant red because we had to return for dinner and a show. Although the view from the top wasn't that exciting, I was a bit annoyed we had to leave early. While I appreciated that we got to descend before most of the crowd, I think it was bad planning of our tour guide, who, when re-scheduling our itinerary compared to what the tour company planned, scheduled the sunset viewing and the dinner show on the same night. (Our tour guide rearranged the schedule based on how crowded things were and, in his experience, the best times of day to be certain places.)

Our dinner destination was the oddly-named Amazon Angkor, where we partook of an extensive buffet and watched traditional Khmer dances. The meal was okay; I found a couple dishes I liked. Some dishes at the buffet were made as we watched (e.g., pad thai, papaya salad), though that didn't make them any better than the other dishes.

The show, on the other hand, was pretty fun. I recorded some pictures and movies.

Returning to our hotel, we called it a day.