They have this image of being long-forgotten ancient temples, remnants from an old civilization rediscovered by the French in the jungles of ‚Indochine‘. Not too much of this is actually true, but it is great fabric for adventure movies, so some of them like Tomb Raider were shot here and it is this type of stories that visitors love. Hence tourists from around the world flock Angkor and its temples lose themselves in the mysteries of the past and make it the major tourist attraction in South-East Asia.
So what is Angkor? It is an area in central Cambodia where the Khmer people had built their capitals between the 10th and the 14th century, roughly the same period than the late Middle Ages in Europe. At the center of their mostly wooden capital cities they built dozens of stone temples and Angkor Wat (Wat meaning temple) is the most elaborate one, kind of the Khmer master piece. Angkor Wat was built in the 12th century, when the Khmer Empire was the biggest in South-East Asia. Not many texts from the Khmer themselves survived until today, so besides the analysis of the ruins and artefacts, much of the information comes from people that have visited the Khmer, like the Chinese Zhou Daguan in 1296. About 150 years later the Thai raided Angkor, burned the city to the ground and ended the golden age of the Khmer. The area was abandoned and only a few monks lived there until the French came, cut back some of the jungle that had overgrown many of the ruins and started with restoration work.
We started our visit of Angkor with a sunset from the mountain temple of Phnom Bakheng. Obviously it was not the two of us on a solitary hill, but queuing with hundreds of other tourists. And though the sunset was really cloudy, the panoramic view of the Angkor area including the biggest ancient capital city of Angkor Thom in the North, the famous Angkor Wat in the South-East and the big water reservoir West Baray in the West, was really worth it.
The three-day ticket sounded most reasonable to us, so the morning after we cycled around the some of the older and smaller temples, which are less busy but not neccessarily less impressive. The facial expressions of the huge stone heads over the entrance gate, the sculptural details in some of the full-breasted devatas (female godesses) and the gigantic scale of the symmetric moats, the steep stairs, endless walls, protective enclosures and shady pagodas are breathtaking. It is not really clear why so many of the Khmer kings moved their capital a few kilometers only to build new city walls, another state temple, new water reservoirs and possibly new wooden houses for tens of thousands of people, but it certainly keeps today’s tourists busy for a long time. My personal favourite on the first day was Ta Prohm, the temple that the French „restorateurs“ chose to be left untouched to show how the trees took over the buildings. Though even this temple is in the process of being reconstructed, but it still has areas where the huge sandstone blocks lie around like LEGO and huge roots of jungle giants wrap themselves around the temple structures.
Julia was brave enough to go and catch the sunrise above Angkor Wat the day after. Though that meant getting up at 4:30am, cycling 10 km through the dark and fighting with hundreds of other people for the best spot in front of that little pond where the main sanctuary and the rising sun mirrow themselves in the water. Some of these photos are the reward. The main artistic significance of Angkor Wat besides the architecture comes from the several hundred metre long bas-reliefs that were carved into the sand stone of the outer galleries. They depict scenes from the life of the Khmer kings as well as stories from the Hindu epic Ramayana, like the really funny creation story of the churning of the sea of milk.
Probably the second most famous temple of Angkor is Bayon, the temple of the many faces in the middle of the ancient city of Angkor Thom, meaning „Great City“. We spent the afternoon in the Bayon’s maze-like galleries, cloisters and staircases stunned by the ever new perspectives on the huge stone faces that tower over it. And after a tour of some of the other remants of the great city like the aptly named elephant terrace, we cycled back to our hostel in the dusk. On day three we explored the so-called Roulous group, a set of even older temple structures 20 km further east. Naturally, we reached even those outlying temples on our two bicycles.
It is like with many UNESCO world heritage sites: a hotspot of busloads of tourists with pink baseball caps, magnet for touts of all shapes and sizes as well as a truly amazing archeological site. Though it is tiring at times to visit, it certainly is for a reason that everybody comes here.
