All of the temples, no matter their precise provenance, were monumental in scale. Vast bridges, huge gates, and tall towers were rendered more impressive by both the intricacies and complexities of their designs and decorations and the exclusive use of gray stone, now in a state of advanced decay. There's nothing like a thousand-year-old giant Buddhaface glaring at you as you pass beneath it into an enormous ruined temple to make you feel like you stepped into an Indiana Jones film -- especially with all the snake imagery, or nagas, slithering around.
We visited temple after temple, each one clearly different in design or setting, but similarly beautiful. Thinking back on it, it's sort of as if all of Europe's great cathedrals were brought into the same rainforest, and then allowed to decay for 800 to 1100 years. Some of the temples were complete ruins, although many have been adopted by UNESCO countries and are being rebuilt -- sometimes not very authentically. Some temples, notably Ta Prohm, are also famous for their odd trees, which seem to sprout directly out of the stone ruins, breaking the stone apart over hundreds of years but also now becoming its critical and inextricable support. I wonder what Byron would have made of these.
Finally we made our way back to Angkor Wat itself, seeing it in the full light of day. While it wasn't the spiritual experience of our sunrise journey, the scale and beauty of the temple was definitely clearer in the sun. All in all, Angkor Wat is the largest religious complex on the planet, and is perhaps the only one of the Angkor temples so important that it has never really been allowed to go to ruins, like the others. This time we approached from the West, going through the back gate and several courtyards before arriving at the center. The entire complex mirrors the home of the gods in Hinduism, the religion for which the temple was originally built, and then adapted to Buddhism. At the center is the temple proper, representing Mount Meru, the dwelling of the gods, with its five towers representing the five peaks. The radiating courtyards and their tall walls represent the surrounding mountain ranges, with the moat finally representing the ocean. The journey we took that morning was symbolically crossing from the profane to the sacred, climbing the mountains to visit the gods. The mountains in question, according to some and later Buddhist mythmaking, are the Himalayas I visited in Nepal.
After seeing the temples (and eating lunch at some point), we headed back into town and walked around local shops for a time. MP bought a dress and some other gifts, and I bought a Cambodian-style shirt, which is perfect for sweating in. We wandered around the touristy section of town, including Pub Street, and grabbed dinner at what I think was meant to be an Italian restaurant.
The next day, more temples awaited us. This time we hired a private guide and tuk tuk, and decided to see some of the outlying temples, as much as 45 kilometers away. The morning started with a bracing and long open-air tuk tuk drive out to the farthest point, the Banteay Srei temple -- Temple of Beauty (or Temple of Women). Built out of red sandstone, it's like a pink version of many of the other temples, but in "miniature" -- which is to say, towers only 30 or 40 feet high rather than hundreds of feet. It certainly has a miniature and intimate feel, and the red sandstone lends itself to more intricate carvings, which covered the place. Amazingly, the temple was built and consecrated by the middle of the 10th century.
On the way back our guide stopped and took us to see some of the locals making sugar out of sugar cane and local palms. The process is fun to watch and smells great, and we even got to taste some of the finished product.
Next came, surprise, more temples. A few were especially memorable, including a very dense one that is flooded during the rainy season, making each shrine, tower, and "library" an island separated from the others. I used the phrase "jungle of stone" in describing the tombs of the Maharanas of Udaipur; this was similar, except more meticulously planned out. I can't imagine how surreal (and buggy) this place must get when the rains come and fill up the canals you can see in the pictures below.
We visited a few more massive temples that truly did feel like climbing mountains. In the first picture below we had already ascended halfway up the temple; in the second, we're almost to the top, and still new spires keep rising. By the time you reach the top, in some cases you're above the canopy of trees and can see, five or six or a dozen kilometers across the rainforest, the spires of the other temples.
The last two temples were very different from each other. The first was the most water-themed temple we saw, and the only spherically organized one. Called the Neak Pean, at the center was a circular island with a spire, surrounded by a lake that rises and falls with the seasons. During the wet season, it overflows, and is channeled by the temple into four subsidiary pools in the cardinal directions, with spouts representing a man, a lion, a horse, and an elephant -- representing the elements earth, fire, wind and water. Bathing in each of the pools was said to balance the elements within each person, and bring health.
The final temple was by far the most destroyed, almost more ruins than temple. Wandering around was a lot of fun, though, and a pleasant way to come off of a bit of temple fatigue.
Our guide on this day was extremely pleasant and very knowledgeable about the temples and their history. Since we spent the whole day with him, inevitably we started veering off the topic of the temples. We were very interested in his background, and he in ours. He had gone to college to study tourism, and his career as a government-approved tour guide made him a success in his society. Despite his deep knowledge of the temples and the Hindu and Buddhist religions, when he asked about our religions I was surprised at how little he knew of the outside world -- especially being among the more educated class, having friends who were poets and novelists. He had never heard of the Jews or Israel (and thought Jerusalem was in Egypt), and when I tried to explain that the Jews were the people out of which the Christians arose and that Jesus was a Jew (thinking to impress him), we discovered he didn't know who Jesus was. He had heard of Christianity, but not of Jesus. I haven't yet decided what I think about that and what political or cultural statements I could make out of it, but I was honestly surprised.
So ended our time in Cambodia, which we had come to really enjoy. We had been staying in a guest house run by an expat British couple, and the place was so pleasant that I completely understood for once why someone in their 30s or 40s would choose to move to this place to run a hotel/pub and just enjoy life. Part of me really didn't want to leave.
Cambodia was not at all what I expected, and it lies outside of the themes and currents that seem to be sweeping up the rest of East Asia: globalization, commerce, modernization, ambition. The freneticism of places like Malaysia, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and even Singapore was not to be found here, and we were glad for it.
On to Thailand.
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