So, about Angkor ... I know that a few people reading this have already been there, so to you, apologies for filling this entry with stuff you already know and things you've already seen.
To everyone else, I just wanna say this: if you've got any interest in ancient sites at all, you really, really should go there. In the last entry I quoted Henri Mouhot as saying that the temples are "grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome", and he wasn't wrong. Angkor is, in a word, mind-blowing.
The typical tour starts with sunrise at Angkor Wat, which is the best preserved of the area's temples and palaces, as well as being ... get this ... the biggest religious structure of any kind, anywhere in the world! So, y'know, it makes a fairly obvious centrepiece.
(Wat means "temple", btw.)
In practical terms, catching the sunrise means stumbling out of bed at 4:30am, eyes half-closed, dragging yourself into the shower, dragging yourself out again, making a mental list of all the things you need for the day, forgetting the list completely before you've even finished it, packing whatever useful stuff you can see, and rushing downstairs to meet your tuk-tuk driver, still barely awake and definitely not functioning in the brain area.
The driver smiles and whisks you off through the darkened streets of Siem Reap (the closest town to the temples – previously a place with a definite 'Wild East' vibe, which is still faintly discernible despite the plethora of tourist hotels, travel agents and restaurants). Half an hour later, as the dark of night slowly softens to pre-dawn grey, you emerge from jungle into a wide clearing, where a large body of dark water appears on your right.
My first thought upon seeing this was "Ooh, what a pretty lake". Then we rounded a corner, and the lake followed us in a 90-degree turn. I thought "Huh?" (which is about my level of mental sophistication at 5:30am), realising later that I was in fact looking at an extraordinarily wide moat, encircling a walled city. I was subsequently told that, back in the day, the king ordered this moat to be filled with crocodiles (whereas, if I had my own city, I'd have quite a tough time deciding what to fill the moat with. It'd probably end up being either mango juice or bubble bath. Guess I'd be a fairly crap god-king.)
To get across the moat you walk over a huge sandstone bridge, then through a grand gateway (constructed with elephant access in mind), where the bridge becomes a kind of raised stone highway. It stretches from the city's entrance all the way to the far end, where the temple stands.
Along the road there are stairways down to ground level, each guarded by seven-headed serpents. While in themselves they're not the most visually impressive features of Angkor Wat, the stairways are extremely cool for this reason: they show where each street began in the original city plan.
See, Angkor was actually not just a city but an empire of cities, each with a temple at its centre. Around the temple, people lived, worked, ate, shopped and, when they were sick of all that, died. The signs of their habitation are completely gone now, 'cause it was believed that only constructions dedicated to the gods should be made of stone. So these were wooden cities. But unlike the other sites in the area, Angkor Wat gives you enough of a sketch to imagine a whole metropolis functioning within its walls.
See, Angkor was actually not just a city but an empire of cities, each with a temple at its centre. Around the temple, people lived, worked, ate, shopped and, when they were sick of all that, died. The signs of their habitation are completely gone now, 'cause it was believed that only constructions dedicated to the gods should be made of stone. So these were wooden cities. But unlike the other sites in the area, Angkor Wat gives you enough of a sketch to imagine a whole metropolis functioning within its walls.
When you consider that there are 100s of these temples already uncovered, with an estimated 1,200 still hidden in the jungle, this makes Angkor a full-blown civilsation in itself. Somewhere in a guide book I read that, in the 11th century, over a million people lived there. At around the same time, the population of London was about 50,000. So y'know, we're talking huge here.
Anyway, as you walk towards the popular viewing spots, Khmer people run up and start trying to sell you coffee from nearby stalls. Seemed like a pretty fabulous idea to me, so I bought my tall glass of coffee and shared the sunrise with a squillion other tourists, before escaping as quickly as possible from the hordes to do some exploring inside the temple. This is when the fun really began.
of them lined with statues and carvings that depict episodes from mythology. In fact, there's pretty much everything
As with the other temples and palaces of Angkor, you can climb all over the many structures in Angkor Wat to your heart's content. The elegant outbuildings are accessible only by partly-worn staircases that are almost vertical, but you can get up onto those too. You can even – if you have the inclination – place a beautiful Ukrainian woman on top of one of them, and encourage her to reach into the morning sky, just for the sake of a good photo. But of course, only irresponsible husbands do that sort of thing. I personally wouldn't recommend it ...
Inside the walls of the wat, trying to take in both the scale and the level of fine detail together is quite overwhelming. There are grand halls with Hindu and Buddhist carvings adorning every surface ('cause Cambodian religion is a mixture of these two faiths with some pre-existing pagan/animist beliefs thrown in). There are forests of stone columns holding up ornately carved ceilings. There are long cloisters and
hallways, some
of them lined with statues and carvings that depict episodes from mythology. In fact, there's pretty much everything
you'd want from a temple of great antiquity, in pretty darn generous quantities. Not only that, but
somehow the whole thing is rendered in a symphony of rich monochromes and variegated colours that change throughout the day. (We know this because we went back to Angkor Wat the following day to get some more pics in bright afternoon sunshine.)
From Angkor Wat, you head by tuk-tuk to Angkor Thom, also the centre of a great city now swallowed by the jungle. This temple is quite confusing in its layout, conceived as a "mountain of faces" and subsequently
re-modelled by successive kings into a mish-mash of styles and ground plans. But you sense you're getting further into the wilderness here – at Angkor Wat, you feel that nature has been effectively held at arm's length, but Angkor Thom and surrounding structures (including the enigmatically named 'Terrace of the Leper King') are set in a huge park with jungle licking at the edges, clearly wanting to reclaim the whole area.
None of this, however, will prepare you for what you see when you leave central Angkor and head to the eastern part of the former empire. Out here lies a temple called Ta Prohm, which would have to be one of the world's weirdest structures, just in the way that nature and architecture have joined together in a relationship which is both symbiotic and mutually destructive at the same time.
Before I go further, I should probably give you just a little more background info (not enough to send you to sleep, I hope). The khmer people always knew that Angkor's temples were there somewhere in the jungle, but other than Angkor Wat (which was inhabited and cared for by Buddhist monks), the khmer didn't set out to find and restore them. The restoration efforts only started in the late 19th and early 20thC, and were/are mainly conducted by an organisation called the École Française d'Extrême Orient.
When the École first arrived in Cambodia, many of the temples were in an advanced state of disrepair; the stones were discoloured by fungus and bat droppings, while silk cotton trees and other arboreal giants had taken root between building blocks, ripping apart walls and sending rooves crashing to the jungle floor as they grew to enormous dimensions. It was clearly going to be a huge job fixing even one of these temples, let alone all of them.
Over a century later, the École's restoration efforts grind on. But at some early point in the process, they decided that cleaning up everything would deny visitors the pleasure of seeing these vast stone edifices in the state they were in when found. So the decision was made: let's leave a few of the temples as they were when we found them, doing just enough work to stop them falling apart any further.
When archaeologists from the École first came to the site, Ta Prohm's walls were under attack from an unlikely enemy: giant silk cotton trees and strangler figs (or possibly golden apple tress; sources disagree about the identity of this species).
The fruits of these trees are eaten by birds, whose droppings contain the seeds for the next generation. If a bird leaves a dropping on a stone wall, and a seed finds its way through a crack in the sandstone (between two blocks, for example), the tiny seed will germinate in the darkness and, in time, become a huge "wooden octopus"** strangling and suffocating its prey.
Maybe the most fascinating aspect of this (for me at least) is that in some cases the trees are actually the only things preventing a complete collapse of the temple walls, whereas in others, they're crushing and tearing the stonework year by year, and causing amounts of damage that you wouldn't dare put a dollar sign on. So it's a love-hate relationship between stone and wood, between nature and architecture.
In the end, you decide to brave the Happy Pizza ... I mean, the signs are so blatant, it must be legal, right? And the guy taking orders is so middle-aged and respectable looking, he can't possibly be part of the 'criminal element', peddling substances which make people think they're alien rabbits. There's just no way.
An hour later, head to the conveience store to grab some snacks for tomorrow's temple-viewing, continually asking yourself "Has the pizza started working yet?" After a little bit of giggling and a few odd but inconclusive moments, decide that in fact, the happiest thing on your pizza was probably the blue cheese.
And that – apart from a visit to the night market to do a bit of haggling and be chased by people who want your dead skin to feed their fish – is your day. Time to head back to the hotel and rest; you've been awake for a ridiculously long time!
Goodnight )))
* An often-cited quote from the book "Ancient Angkor" by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques.
Maybe the most fascinating aspect of this (for me at least) is that in some cases the trees are actually the only things preventing a complete collapse of the temple walls, whereas in others, they're crushing and tearing the stonework year by year, and causing amounts of damage that you wouldn't dare put a dollar sign on. So it's a love-hate relationship between stone and wood, between nature and architecture.
The École are doing their best to keep the balance, letting the trees remain
in place wherever possible while re-inforcing the structures which they're parasitising. But one gets the feeling that no group of mere humans can determine the fate of this site. Whether the jungle or the gods will emerge as victors is something only time can decide.
By the time you've seen these and two or three other sites at Angkor, it's mid- to late afternoon and you're feeling more than a little mind-blown, exhausted and temporarily 'templed out'. So then, there you are in northern Cambodia, wondering what the Hell there is to do here (I mean, apart paying to stand in a glass tank for 15 minutes, so that small fish can eat the skin off your feet – something that's offered on almost every street corner here).
Then you notice the signs saying "Happy Pizza", and you think
"Hmmm ... should I risk it? Is it a crime in this country? Will it make me miss my 5am start for the excursion tomorrow? And how strong will it be? Strong enough to make me think I'm a flying bunny on an interstellar mission to spread joy throughout the world via the medium of the Happy Dance? This is Indo-China, after all".
In the end, you decide to brave the Happy Pizza ... I mean, the signs are so blatant, it must be legal, right? And the guy taking orders is so middle-aged and respectable looking, he can't possibly be part of the 'criminal element', peddling substances which make people think they're alien rabbits. There's just no way.
Ok, enough justification. You know you're trying it for one reason only: namely 'cause you want to.
And that – apart from a visit to the night market to do a bit of haggling and be chased by people who want your dead skin to feed their fish – is your day. Time to head back to the hotel and rest; you've been awake for a ridiculously long time!
Goodnight )))
* An often-cited quote from the book "Ancient Angkor" by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques.
** A phrase used by one of Yuliya's friends when she saw a pic we'd taken of a huge silk cotton tree growing on top of a temple wall.
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