The World is My Oyster

This post is part of my Siem Reap series. See day 1 here. Eaters go here.

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On second day, we departed from the hostel around 8:30am with our lovely tuktuk driver, to the majestic Angkor Wat, the biggest temple of them all. It’s just in front of Ta Promh Kei that we went the day before.Now it’s very difficult to describe how big this place is. I often felt that my camera was not big enough to capture everything (not as in the actual size of the camera, but… oh you know what I mean). So just follow me bit by bit and hopefully we can show some parts of it ;)So here we start. YAY! We’re at the front gate.

The building you see behind me is not the temple. It’s the gate.

Still gate.

Buddha inside gate building. Angkor temples are fusion between Hindu and Buddhism.

Outside of the gate we found another long terrace. At one side we found these people with costumes. You can take pictures with them for a few dollars.

Walk a little bit more and you’d find this library. O well, what used to be.

Feel like I was in Greece. Not that I’ve been there before..

Some parts of the building would look obviously new (like that pillar behind me). They are restoring a lot of bits and pieces. Almost all the temples were destroyed during war. Apparently they were all in pretty messed up conditions when the outside world found out about this historic place. Countries from all over the world give hands to help Cambodia restore of what little they have left. Each of the smaller temples were ‘adopted’ by different country, from Japan, French, Africa, China, India, and more.

One of the best view of the inner temple that I can get. The ones that don’t have hundreds of people blocking my camera.

HERE is the main building! Finally!

We’ve walked so far to go in… That tiny building is the gate I showed you earlier.

Going in, we found a lot of hallways like this. Very very long hallways.

My favorite spot. Giant cloister.

I had to be in the picture to show you how BIG it is! Still the picture can’t do it justice. It’s huge!

Rendy is crazy about Buddha. He’s attracted to it like mouse to cheese, like bee to flower, like magnet to refrigerator. He has to take pictures with all the Buddha he sees XD

Have I told you how STEEP the steps were? They’re not only steep, they’re ridiculously narrow. You have to step like a crab (on your side) to fit your feet. I wonder how all the monks that time climb up and down the steps. Crawling up and down doesn’t seem cool at all. Did they just have very short feet and very long legs?

After I came back to Singapore, Hailey told me that someone fell from the steep steps and died. I wasn’t surprised. Seriously, someone must have died because of those steps. The husband then donated some money for them to make safer steps. So sometimes wooden steps were there at what I assumed the more dangerous spots. Oh by the way, I really don’t think Angkor is a good place to visit with your kids. The best spots are hard (to the point of dangerous) to get to. Then after you get there, there’s no safety bar or whatever. So you can be very high up without anything to keep you from falling down deep deep below..

Like this high up..

Or this..

It’s all really gorgeous. Amazing. Awesome. Jaw-dropping. I’m running of words to describe ;)

One of the most famous bas-relief, The Churning of the Sea of Milk, telling story about the gods and asuras (demons) pulling alternately on the body of the giant naga, which is coiled around Mount Mandara. They rotate the mountain for 1000 years to produce amrita, the elixir of immortality (I have a friend names Amrita by the way. Elixir of immortality, what a cool name!) They’re supposed to share it half and half, but of course, as demons they don’t play it fair and steal the stuff. Remember these gods and demons pulling a naga, because you’d see it again and again everywhere you go around Angkor. No idea why it got so popular among all stories.

Almost all the carvings depict figure of women. I think Rendy realized this first. He felt discriminated as a man LOL. I think I read somewhere that a long time ago the Kings in Cambodia had women as soldiers and warriors, and there was no (or few) men in the palace. Men were proven to be the ones who betrayed. Women were loyal. In their entire history, there was no woman betrayed the King.

This was the back gate. We walked there and there was nothing much. I bought a guide book and a bunch of postcards for $7. Here we learned that Siem Reap people had a completely different marketing technique than any other places I’ve ever visited. They would shout ‘one dollar! one dollar!’ for anything. And when you actually approach them, thinking that it’s really $1, it’s not. For my book the lady there shouted $2, and after I browsed through deciding to buy, she said “Nooo that’s not $2. This is $2 (suddenly had another much uglier book coming out from her basket).”

We got sort of annoyed after a while with people shouting $1 for the same book. So just for fun, one time we pretended to snatch the book right away when the guy shouted $1. Then he sheepishly smiled, saying “Free to look! One dollar! Free to look!” (As if he could charge us for looking *roll eyes*) Notice that the guy still said ‘one dollar’, like it’s some kind of magical word. We humored him, “Really? One dollar? We take okay! One dollar!” At the end he said, “Noo.. 1000 baht..” all the while smiling sheepishly (Baht is Thai money, sometimes they use this. 1000 baht=~$20-$30) O well, you played us we played you lor. We all were grinning all the way through. Can’t really blame people for trying to make a living =P

Angkor Wat from the back gate.

We tracked back to the front gate after that, but not by climbing up the main building again. We took the pathway on the side of the building. There was a separate small building for the toilet on one of the sides. The toilets were all surprisingly clean. But they were also ridiculously dark. Looked like they had light bulbs, but there was no electricity *_*. Couldn’t turn on the lights, I had to do all business in the pitch-dark. It’s really possible that the electricity had not gone in yet. Siem Reap is currently building like crazy, you could see new buildings and constructions everywhere.

The side of building. The toilet was behind those trees.

So that’s that for Angkor Wat. The guide book suggests several hours to spend here. We spent around 2 hours.

ps: I will try to conclude all the other temples in one post for the next one.