Cambodia - Day 3

Michael and I woke up at 4:30AM to see the sunrise over Angkor Wat. It took about 30 minutes to get to Ankgor Wat and by the time we got there it looked like we would miss the sunset entirely. We didn’t, and even if we had it wouldn’t have mattered, it was too cloudy. I know I’ve seen aerial photos of Angkor Wat before but when I looked at it in person for the first time I must have forgotten about them. My first thought was, “What? Angkor Wat is really small”. There is a large stone walkway that goes over a huge moat and leads up to the front of the temple which, as I soon found out, is just the front gate.

Once inside the front gate you are greeted with the inner temple area several hundred yards away. The sun wasn’t quite up yet, though by now Mike and I realized there were too many clouds for a beautiful sunrise. From the outer temple area it is a five minute walk or so to the inner area. The inner area of the temple is a confusing maze of stone doorways, halls, towers, and stairs. Some of you will have no idea what I mean by this, I know my brothers will understand, but Angkor Wat reminded me of the computer game Quake 1. I kept thinking of that game as I walked around the temple. With the sun struggling to come through the clouds there was an eerie gloom cast over everything, I had entered a world of strange shadows and dark corners.

From memory, Angkor Wat seems to have a layout as follows: Imagine a large rectangle with another smaller rectangle inside it, and a smaller one still inside that one, and yet a smaller one still. Each rectangle is raised above the previous one so that the inner ones have multiple levels, and the “lines” of the rectangles are long, dark walkways. In the inner sections of Angkor Wat there are large towers with extremely steep stairs leading to the very top of the towers. The stairs were roped off but there are signs inviting you to climb the stairs, as long as you were careful. Michael and I were confused by the conflicting information so we opted not to climb to the very top this time (but we did when we returned later that morning).

Walking through Angkor Wat, I quickly realized how huge it is. Walking on the Great Wall was impressive but you can’t get an idea of its size unless you walk the entire length or see it from space. You can walk through Angkor Wat in an hour or two, though a more careful inspection would take all day. For that reason I think Angkor Wat is the most amazing thing humans have ever constructed (I even think it surpasses the pyramids, we’ll see if I still think so after I visit them). The moat around Angkor Wat, which is 190 meters wide and over 2 miles long, is an amazing feat of construction. Using today’s equipment it would probably still take a year to dig it, back when it was constructed they had nothing more than shovels.

The one thing that makes Angkor Wat so stunning is the amount of stone blocks that were used to construct it. Everything in sight is comprised of carefully cut stone blocks. Even more amazing are the amount of stone carvings of Hindu deities and other aspects of Hindu mythology. The entire temple itself is supposed to be representation of Mount Meru, the mountain of the gods in Hindu mythology. The outer enclosure of the temple contains what is reputedly the largest bas-relief scenes ever carved, depicting scenes from the Hindu epic the Ramayana. It wraps around the entire outer part of the temple making it slightly shorter than the moat I mentioned previously.

As the sun came up I noticed mist rolling in from the jungle, slowly engulfing the trees that surrounded the outer wall of the temple. In the inner areas of the temple there were fewer tourists and it was silent except for the chirping of birds in the distance and the sound of chants from a nearby Buddhist monastery. I noticed that the grass in between the inner and outer sections of the temple was wet with dew. The eerie sensation was slowly lifting as the sun started to illuminate the darker corners and crevices of the temple. The pictures I had taken when it was darker did not come out well so I took the opportunity to record some video and get some better pictures (I ended up taking hundreds of pictures).

After wandering around Angkor Wat for an hour or so Michael and I walked through the back entrance and followed a dirt path that looped back around to the front. Two girls from Semester At Sea were walking a short distance behind us and as we got closer to what looked like a small village a bunch of children ran up to us and tried to sell us bracelets. When Mike or I refused on the grounds that we didn’t have any money they asked, “What about your girlfriend, ask her for money” which was funny since we didn’t even know who the girls were (later they suddenly became our wives). One of the orphans, a little girl, asked me where I was from and I replied with “far away.” In the markets in China the vendors will ask you what country you are from so they know what currency to quote prices in, I assumed this was the same reason the little girl was asking so I thought I would be a smart ass this time. She misunderstood me though and responded by saying, “Norway, capital is Oslo” and then proceeded to tell me the population. I was impressed but I still didn’t want to buy any of her bracelets.

The orphans were cute and they spoke good English but they got annoying quickly. We had to get out of there fast so I made some empty promises to come back later and buy some bracelets (in fact we were coming back later in the afternoon, and though I wasn’t planning on buying bracelets I eventually did). Mike and I walked back across the long walkway leading to the outer gate and met up with our tour guide who was sitting near the moat. We talked about the temple a bit and then watched a monkey walking along the wall next to the moat. We made our way back to the bus, got harassed by more orphans, and then watched as the other SAS kids got conned into buying bracelets and postcards from the orphans.

Back at the hotel we got showered, had breakfast, and then joined the rest of our group to go visit another temple, Ta Prohm. I had no idea what to expect with Ta Prohm, and frankly I was doubtful that it would be much to see after Angkor Wat. However, I was proven wrong once again and at this point I gave up trying to second-guess Cambodian temples. As our group walked on a path through the jungle to get to the temple we noticed a group of people playing traditional Cambodian music. Most of us ignored them but some of us noticed the sign that explained that they were land-mine victims who play traditional Cambodian music for money rather than resorting to begging (Cambodia has the highest per-capita rate of amputees in the world). I recorded a video of the music because it sounded amazing and on the way back I gave them some money because they definitely deserved it.

Ta Prohm, as I soon found out, was special because the builders planted trees on the top of it in many places. Over 800 years later the trees were huge and the roots snaked down all over the temple to reach the ground. Ta Prohm has only recently been undergoing restoration so unlike Angkor Wat it was a mess. The roots of the trees that are planted on top of the temple act as supports and without them the entire thing would have collapsed long ago. There were piles of stone blocks everywhere and the entire temple was a strange green color due to the moss that had covered the stone and never been cleaned. More than Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm made me feel like I was in the middle of an alien archaeological site on another planet. Partly because it was falling down and partly because it seemed more compressed Ta Prohm really felt like a maze, so much so that our group got split up numerous times and we even lost our guide at one point.

Though Ta Prohm is considerably smaller than Angkor Wat it still took us a good 45 minutes to walk through it and we were being rushed by the tour guide because we had more temples to visit. On the way back I gave a few dollars to the amputee musicians and bought an erhu (a two-stringed bowed instrument) for $15 from a vendor. Unfortunately, erhus aren’t nearly as easy to play as the guy selling them made it look. To make matters worse one of the strings broke when I was going through customs back in Saigon. When I play it, it sounds like a dying animal which might come in handy some time, who knows.

Our next stop was Angkor Wat – again. For most of our group this was their first time seeing Angkor Wat. Though it was later in the day there weren’t as many tourists as I expected. This time we went through the east gate, which is in the back. Mike and I noticed some people climbing up the steep stairs to the very top of the towers in the center of Angkor Wat so we decided to climb them this time too. We got to the top only to have someone from SAS tell us that security guards were coming so we should get down. Since we didn’t feel like being kicked out of Angkor Wat we climbed down, but no security guards ever came. Michael and I walked around getting pictures of Mr. Carrot (a stuffed carrot that Mike has had for over 10 years now) in strange places, such as on top of a decapitated Buddha statue.

Since we both had to use the bathroom really badly (and we didn’t feel like peeing in Angkor Wat again which we both did on the first trip) we walked around following signs pointing us to the toilets. Unfortunately the signs led directly to the orphans. Now that it was midday we could see that it was not a village but a monastery. At some point we had learned from our tour guide that all Cambodian children receive free education and the orphans are taught English and other subjects by the Buddhist monks in the monasteries.

As we were wandering around near the monastery, debating whether we were allowed to go inside, a little girl walked up to us and began telling us about “our friend over there in the red shirt”. Indeed, there was a girl in a red shirt a short distance away, but she wasn’t our friend. We eventually found out that this girl, from SAS, had spent the past hour talking to one of the orphan girls. The little girl took her into the monastery, taught her how to pray, and introduced her to her teacher. She also wrote a letter to her that was so funny. It had a flower on it and said things like, “I’m sorry to bother you, you have a nice smile; I hope you enjoy Angkor Wat” and so on.

At some point other orphans joined us and though we didn’t recognize them two of the girls remembered us, “I remember you from before! You promised to come back and buy bracelets!” Remembering that I had promised them, I bought ten bracelets for a dollar. If anyone wants some Cambodian orphan bracelets let me know when I get back. The other little girls started bothering Michael, asking him if he wanted bracelets and when he said no they just asked for a dollar. He agreed to give both of them a dollar if they would let him take their picture. After the picture he gave them each a dollar and one of the girls gave him a personalized note with random things written in English.

Suddenly a bunch of other orphans came running and things started to get ugly. This one little boy wasn’t very happy about the situation and kept demanding a dollar saying, “You are a boy, why do you give a dollar to the girl but not to me?” He repeated that over and over, getting increasingly angry. A girl with him who was alternating between being on the verge of tears and being extremely angry kept asking Mike, “What about me? What about me?” We started to walk away from the monastery, but the two orphans followed closely. They kept repeating, “You give money to a girl but not a boy”, “what about me?” At one point Mike kept apologizing to the boy and he had had enough apologies because he said, “I don’t want your sorries, I want your dollars!” which made us both collapse into laughter.

Around this time we ran into a few other girls from SAS who were amazed to see two SAS guys being trailed by the angriest orphans they ever saw. I believe one of them took a few photographs of the occasion. Finally the orphans turned around and walked away but not before sounding like a broken record. We made it back to the buses where I snapped some pictures of some SAS girls being mobbed by orphans. At one point I heard an orphan yell, “You are from America you must buy a postcard!” In another instance one of the kids getting back on the bus responded to an orphan’s frantic attempts at selling postcards by asking him for a dollar to which the orphan responded, “OK, I give you one dollar and you buy postcards for two dollars”.

After lunch, we visited several places including Angkor Thom, Bayon temple, and Baphuon temple which also included the elephant terrace. We didn’t really see much of Angkor Thom, it is the ancient Khmer capital, but we passed through it on our way to Bayon temple. The outer parts of Bayon temple were in an even greater state of disrepair than Ta Prohm. There were several parts that just consisted of stone doorways and random stone pillars in the middle of nothing, all of the other stone had collapsed and been pushed into 20 foot tall piles in a corner. Possibly because much of it had collapsed Bayon temple felt more spacious.

As Michael and I were walking around the upper-level of the innermost part of Bayon temple we came upon an embarrassing scene involving an SAS student who decided to climb to the domed top of the main tower. Considering that the temple was falling apart you’d think he would have noticed and decided that climbing around a collapsing temple was a bad idea. It took a tour guide from another group yelling, “You! You crazy man, get down!” to get him to come down. A crowd began to form and security guards came over. As he began to climb down I started to walk away, I didn’t feel like seeing an SAS student fall to his death in Cambodia. There were two guys with professional-looking video cameras nearby; I hope they got that on film for their documentary or whatever they were filming.

After we left Bayon temple we wandered around, with some others from SAS, absolutely confused because our tour guide had given us multiple conflicting instructions about where and when we should all meet to go back to the buses. Michael and I walked on the elephant terrace which was just a large stone terrace with elephant head carvings. We found the Baphuon temple but we didn’t go in because we didn’t think we had enough time. Instead we waited in the searing heat for our tour guide and the rest of our group. After everyone was together we went back to the buses and then drove to the airport for our flight back to Saigon.

I really liked Cambodia, the temples are the most amazing things I have ever seen or probably will ever see. Considering all the destruction that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge unleashed on Cambodia I’m grateful that they left the temples alone for the most part (the heads and arms of many of the statues were removed, that’s about it). Though Cambodia is still incredibly poor and their government is incredibly corrupt (ranked as one of the most corrupt in the world) they have a wonderful cultural heritage that is sure to continue to attract tourists from all over the world.