Monday, November 18 - Temple Mania or, "Which wat was what?"

Monday, November 18 - Temple Mania or, "Which wat was what?"

We spent the entire day at the Angkor Wat temple complex, and we will freely admit that the many temples we saw began to run together in our minds.  In the interest of retaining at least a few readers, it's best that, rather than go into detail about each temple, we'll include some general observations about the area and let the photos speak for themselves.

The temples dated from the 10th to the 13th centuries, with the earliest ones built of brick and a stone called laterite.  Later construction and ornamentation used large sandstone blocks from 60 km away, carried on bamboo poles and floated downriver on bamboo rafts. The circular holes for poles can still be seen in many stones.  

Depending upon the religious belief of the reigning king at the time of construction, the wats originated as either Hindu or Buddhist temples.  With shifts in the political winds, the wats changed back and forth between the two belief systems.  Typically, if Buddhists took over Hindu temples, they added Buddhas and other appropriate ornamentation, while leaving the Hindu elements intact.  Hindus, however, destroyed Buddhist trappings when control shifted their way.

We did lots of climbing, either on the original temple stone stairs, or on wooden staircases built for today's tourists.  In either case, they were steep and the heights dizzying for some; young children and pregnant women were forbidden to ascend.

The bas reliefs were history books and anthropological studies in stone, depicting in intricate detail the theology, mythology, activities of daily living, amusements, and battlefield exploits of kings, generals, gods, fishermen, housewives, children and demons.  The skill (and stamina!) involved in their creation was almost beyond comprehension.

The wats were surrounded by moats in order to protect them from floods during the rainy season.  We approached several temples on causeways constructed through moats.

Especially during the morning, the most popular temples were clogged with mobs of tourists.  Ta Prohm, where Tomb Raiders was filmed, was almost impassable in spots, as bus loads of Koreans crowded around to have their photos taken in certain iconic spots, like those places where enormous tree roots wrapped around and grew through stone walls and towers. 

Outside the temples were throngs of a different sort: local children, very young children, hawking all manner of trinkets and postcards.  They were beautiful, persistent, annoying and sad.

The temple complex actually encompasses several small villages which pre-date the creation of the archaeological monument and whose residents have a right to remain, so we saw small homes and grazing cows and pigs among the temples.

After lunch, we visited Angkor Wat itself.  The crowds that we'd seen this morning when we drove by had greatly diminished and we were almost alone when we entered the temple through the "back door."  As we approached the Wat, we encountered several monkeys playing and eating fruit for the amusement of visitors and photographers.  We climbed a steep wooden staircase so that we could wander around in the galleries and courtyards on the upper levels of the temple.  The views, both close up and out over the double-walled compound, causeway, outer walls and moat were never ending.  Back closer to ground level, we moved through the long, bas relief-filled galleries that line the perimeter walls of the entire huge temple.

The entire day was almost too much to take in.  One temple after another, king after king, century after century -- the building, on a monumental scale and with rudimentary tools, just continued.  It puts the advances of the modern day in perspective!

By late afternoon, we were templed-out, hot and sticky.  We chilled out in the hotel pool, amid the orchids and other lush tropical plants, and then had dinner in the poolside open area restaurant.