Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm

We reserved Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat for our last full day in Cambodia. Since we had read such a lot about 'temple exhaustion' we thoutght that we should see only these two temple complexes and not get worked up about seeing everything.

One had to buy a pass for 40 USD each which is quite a lot, therefore people try and cram in as much as possible.

We went to Angkor Wat at 2 in the afternoon but it was a cloudy day and our pics did not come out as brilliant as we were hoping for.
The entire city / temple complex is has a high wall 4.5 m high around which is an apron of 30 m open ground and a moat - entered by a causeway crossing the moat.

As we were walking up to the temple we saw quite a lot of sight seeing monks (probably from some other town in Cambodia?). Check out the cell phone and bottled water!

This aerial pic of the complex gives a better idea of the moat. The outer wall encloses a space of 203 acres, which, besides the temple was originally occupied by the city and, to the north of the temple, the royal palace. Like all secular buildings of Angkor, these were built of perishable materials rather than of stone, so nothing remains of them except the outlines of some streets.

The actual temple sits on a sandstone plinth a meter above the ground. The outer wall of the temple is called the "first enclosure," and sits on a plinth 3.3 meters above the causeway level.

Here you see he continuous gallery running along the outside face of the enclosure. 

see the Palmyra trees all over? They make sugar of the fruit.

The temple is a representation of Mount Meru, the home of the gods: the central space formed with the crossing of towers symbolizes the five peaks of the mountain, and the walls and moat represent the surrounding mountain ranges and ocean. The inner enclosure rests on a two-tiered pyramid 11 meters tall.

There are three levels to Angkor Wat. From the walkway a set of stairs leads to the first level. It is rectangular and stretches around the other two levels.
The stairs are extremely steep to the upper terrace. The original steps are so steep it got me wondering how even the king managed to climb it. Or maybe he just sat on someone's shoulders and got carried up in style!

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In the galleries at the temple level, there is some amount of carvings on the walls - mainly of the celestial dancers - the views are very good from up here

 This is what the celestial dancers actually were supposed to look like (maybe ...)

The inside of the lower most gallery has a remarkably high vaulted roof. On the outside is the gallery of bas reliefs - stone murals that cover over 800 meters of the outer wall.
Depicting parts of the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.
The carvings are quite well done with gory details such as he war shown by neat chopped pieces of humans and animals!
Also shown are humans cut up and eaten by crocodiles

Cambodian people are very proud about the temple and it's even put up on their flag. Considering all that they went through with the Khmer Rouge, civil unrest etc, they seem to be doing ok now. The population is mostly young. During the Khmer Rouge a very large number of educated people and proffessionals were killed - this fellow Pol Pot, wanted to have an agrarian society. The result of that is education level is only now picking up but the number of teachers, proffessionals, doctors etc is sorely less.

Here is what could have been the best possible shot - if the sun were shining. You can see the surrounding gallery, the four side towers and the central highest tower at the intersection of the 4 diagonals from 4 towers.

We had a very good guide with us when we went to Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat. I don't know whether it was because of him or because it was just a cloudy, sticky day - but we didn't really get into the groove with Angkor wat. My hind sight is this: the guide, so thrilled we knew and understood all of the hindu mythology stories he was telling us about related to the temple depictions, that he went on and on telling us about the details of different carvings. So it was a bit like going to an 'angkor wat crash course' rather than a relaxed sight seeing. Perhaps, we may not have understood all the nuances of the temple without a guide but may have appreciated it more because of not knowing some of the details. It would have been more mysterious?? Both of us felt that the Angkor wat is over rated - but perhaps it would have been different - had the sun been there, had the guide not been there etc ...

Ta Prohm

On the very last day, just before catching our afternoon flight back to home, we went out for a last minute swing by the Ta prohm temple. It was a good decision as the place had a very special atmosphere with all those strangler fig trees literally chocking the temple. And it was built with a lot of laterite.

We were greeted by this tree spreading out it's roots on the old sandstone walkway

The tree sitting on top of the temple is a fig tree and the tall one on the right side is what they call a gum tree

The hole in the bottom of the gum tree is man made. We noticed a lot of the gum trees had been burnt at the bottom. It's done so as to give the tree a shock and then it releases some resins which the locals collect for food etc. Luckily it doesn't seem to kill the tree

Fig tree that was growing right on top of the temple

Walkways have been built for the convenience of tourists

And guess what? To my delight, we found a couple of Indian archeologists there - they were helping with the restoration work. India started helping Cambodia with the restoration work of Angkor wat way back in the 80's - when the places still had mines around. 

Restoration work consists of numbering the stones piece by piece, disassembling them and then putting it all back together - seems like a lifetimes work

Especially considering that they'd like to keep some of the trees as is to give an idea to the tourists what it must have been like with the jungle growing in. Imagine the crushing weight of this tree on the stones

These metal rods are part of the measuring system to monitor the movement of the monument

This was a beautiful pieces largely in Laterite blocks

The trees are truly enormous!

Look what vanity can make people do: here are some tourists posing with long streaming hair (it was hot and sultry weather) - they did a lot more strange poses but we couldn't wait for the whole entertainment.