A Step Back in Time

Cambodia - land of incredible history and even more incredible heat.  Land of Angkor Wat.  Visiting Angkor Wat has long been a major bucket list item of mine, and I was super excited to finally see it.  It didn’t disappoint.  

Angkor Wat is located in Angkor Ecological Park.  Angkor Ecological Park is a UNESCO world heritage site that covers 155 square miles and is home to 91 temples in all. Of those, 30 are accessible and have been reclaimed from the jungle and restored enough for visitors.  Angkor Wat is only one of those temples, the one that most people have heard of, by far the most famous and photographed.  The temples here were built from the ninth to thirteenth centuries and are constructed out of a very porous but very strong stone called laterite which was then covered by a sandstone facade. This kept the cost of building down as laterite was much less valuable than sandstone; however, because it is not suitable for carving, a sandstone facade was needed so that the temples could be intricately decorated.  And this is not some thin, six-inch thick stone facade.  These stone blocks, laterite and sandstone, are massive.  The quarry where they were mined is near Siem Reap, about 30 miles away. Angkor Wat temple alone used over one million blocks of sandstone. Thousands of elephants were used to transport large sandstone blocks. Smaller blocks were transported using bamboo rafts.  Dirt ramps and pulley systems were used to lift and put the blocks in place. After the temples were assembled, they were carved. The carvings on all the temples are extensive and unbelievably detailed.  They are so uniform that you would be convinced that one person must have done them all, but they were actually done by thousands and thousands of skilled sculptors who were all carefully trained by the same school of art.  

Some of the temple ruins have been restored more extensively than others.  Some still have rubble on the ground, left there to give visitors an idea of the condition the ruins were found in.  There are no earthquakes in Cambodia. The destruction of the temples  was caused mostly by invasive vegetation such as ficus trees and strangler fig vines, floods and the passage of time.   Archeologists from 16 different countries have participated in the restoration process.  They were able to use computer technology to scan the multititude of fallen stone blocks and somehow map out which blocks went where so they could be reassembled.  I can’t even wrap my head around how that is even possible.

Our first stop on our journey through Angkor Ecological Park was Ta Prohm, also known as the jungle temple.  This is the temple where the films Tomb Raider and Two Brothers were filmed.  This temple was deliberately left partially unrestored by archaeologists so that people can get an idea of the condition all the temples were found in, although much of the vegetation has been cleared away so visitors can access it. Giant ficus trees overran it. They are very destructive to sandstone temples. Their root systems are so invasive that they are able to worm their way between the blocks.  As the tree grows, so do its roots, and eventually the blocks are pushed out of position and fall to the ground.   Ta Prohm was built in 1186 by last great king of Angkor.  He was Buddhist king, unlike his Hindu predecessors. This temple was dedicated to his mother, who he honored as the perfect wisdom part of Buddhist trinity.  This is the only temple that had its beginnings as a Buddhist temple.  All of the other temples began as Hindu temples and were later converted to Buddhist temples.  In fact, some of them were converted back and forth more than once.  Here are some pictures of Ta Prohm.

Next up was a visit to Angkor Thom, a royal city within a city, not a temple. It was built five years before Angkor Wat to celebrate victory over the Cham army and was built in a perfect square whose sides measure exactly three kilometers - and this before the invention of the metric system.  We saw some of the gates that lead into the city and also the terrace of the elephants. 

Elephant heads and trunks.

We didn’t stay at Angkor Thom for very long and instead moved on to Bayon, which turned out to be my favorite of all the ruins we visited. There was just something about it that was creepy and weird and beautiful all rolled into one.  

Bayon is known as the temple of the faces. Originally, Bayon had 54 towers, one tower for each Khmer province.  This place was so overrun with vegetation, it took almost 30 years to uncover and clear it.  The carving work here is particularly well preserved.  The bas relief carvings were sheltered under a stone roof which has since collapsed but protected them from the elements for hundreds of years.  They tell the story of the Khmer army marching off to war.

It’s hard to believe that these carvings are over 900 years old.

And then there were the faces....

Cambodia is incredibly hot and humid.  If Thailand was face-meltingly hot and Vietnam’s heat is like standing on the surface of the sun in 4,000 percent humidity, Cambodia’s heat and humidity is like adding the the two together and multiplying by four.  It is so hot you can barely think straight.  You are completely soaked in sweat after being outdoors for less than five minutes.  I’m talking drenched.  And this is the cool season.  I drank six bottles of water over the course of the day and was still thirsty.  I cannot imagine what the people who slaved building these temples must have gone through.  

Because of the intense heat, we had started our tour early in the morning when the temps were still bearable - for the first half hour or so, anyways.  And after Bayon, they took us to a very air-conditioned restaurant for some fantastic Cambodian food and then back to our hotel to rest in air-conditioned bliss before setting out to see the main attraction, the one we’d all been waiting for, Angkor Wat.  

Feeling somewhat renewed and refreshed, we set out for Angkor Wat.  Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world - it covers some 500 acres! - and is rated as the number one cultural destination in the world. It is also one of the UNESCO seven wonders of the world. Angkor Wat is the national symbol of Cambodia. It has been featured on the Cambodian flag since 1863. Did you know that Cambodia is the only country in world with a building on its flag?  Angkor Wat is so important to the Cambodian people that at least 80 percent of Cambodias have visited it and it is considered a must-do for all Cambodians to visit Angkor Wat  at least once in their lifetimes.  

Angkor Wat was built at the same time as Notre Dame in Paris. It took less than 40 years to complete.  Fifteen times more workers worked to build Angkor Wat than worked on the Taj Mahal in India.  That’s a staggering 300,000 people who were associated with construction of Angkor Wat, not to mention over 6,000 elephants.  The huge stone blocks were transported to the building site, then shaped and the rough surfaces smoothed so stones would fit together without gaps. There is nothing between the stones to make them stick together.  The cutting and smoothing process was so precise that the joints between the stones are smooth, straight and very small.  The walls of Angkor Wat are covered in intricate carvings, including 1,500 apsara dancer images. The name Angkor Wat means “City Temple,” and like all the other temples in Angkor Ecological Park, was originally built as Hindu temple.  Angkor Wat was converted to a Buddhist temple in 16th century.  It is the best preserved of all the Angkor temple ruins. 

Something very unique about Angkor Wat is that the front of the temple faces west.  All of the other temples face the east.  No, the builders were not directionally challenged.  The reason it faces west is because the body of the king who built Angkor Wat is buried there so it is actually a temple and a mausoleum.  Temples always face east, the direction of the rising sun and new beginnings.  Mausoleums always face west, the direction of the setting sun.  Kind of poetic, isn’t it?  

So after all this lead-up, are you ready to finally see it?  Feast your eyes on the wonder that is Angkor Wat.

And this was just the lead-in.  We haven’t even gotten to the main structure yet.

Here’s the part of Angkor Wat we all recognize.

An example of the seams between the stones.

The climb to the top of Angkor Wat was heart-stopping.  It is as close to a vertical climb as you can get without actually having to use a ladder.  Thankfully, we had one sweet Indian woman in our group who was determined to climb this thing no matter what even though it was an almighty struggle for her.  She literally would take two steps and stop for at least ten seconds, then two more steps and another ten-second break.  I got behind her because she was going the right speed for me.  I never, ever would have been able to climb this thing if it wasn’t for being able to follow her to the top.  I wouldn’t have even attempted it.  This way I could go at the snail’s pace my heart demands and have no guilt for holding up the line.

I suppose it could have been worse.  We cold have had to climb these stairs like the ancient people did.

This photo shows the laterite/sandstone construction of the Angkor temples.  The reddish stone with all the small holes is the laterite. The gray stones are the sandstone facade.  Some of the facade had fallen away here and had not been replaced so you could see the underlying laterite structure.

The day ended with a beautiful sunset that was reflected in the moat that surrounds Angkor Wat.  It was a gorgeous end to a long-awaited day.  

I wrote most of this post as I was flying home from Thailand and am actually posting it from the comfort of my own bedroom at 1:00 a.m.  (4:00 in the afternoon for me!) Jetlag is a wonderful thing - not! I’ll have one more blog post to cover our final day in Cambodia and close out our trip.  I’ll try to get it written in the next day or so.  Stay tuned!