The Temples of Angkor Wat.

 I came to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat and it didn’t disappoint.  It was built around 1150 and started off as a Hindu temple and later converted to Buddhist.  It is an area of 61 km2 and inside is quite a number of temples and a large area set aside for the people to watch games.  There are records in Chinese history of it being visited in the 12th and 13th century and seems to have been pretty much abandoned for around 150 years, only to be re-discovered for the first time by the Portuguese in 1586 and then abandoned again and rediscovered by the French in 1860.  The French cleaned the place up and took it back from the forest and that must have been a huge job, but Cambodia was under the protection of France, so I guess they had to do their bit.  

When Cambodia had their war with Khmer Rouge, lots of damage and looting occurred and heaps of the statues lost their heads to be sold on the black market.  At some stage there was also a gold statue and gems such as diamonds and sapphires in one of the temples, but that would have been long gone by the time the Khmer Rouge got there, if it existed at all.  

Sara and I climbed to the top of two of the temples just to say we had and it was a fair hike to the top.  They had placed wooden stairs, albeit extremely steep wooden stairs, all the way to the top and underneath was the original rock ones.  They would have taken some navigating as they were about 15cm on the tread and about 40cm to the next step up.  I thought that was a pretty interesting design, consider these people are not tall!  Maybe only the really determined made it to the top?  They also went up about 3 storeys, so one slip and……..oops.  No heaven for you.

Inside Angkor Wat is a whole series of carved friezes telling stories and one was how your earthly life affects you in the afterlife, which was a whole lot of really?  So, if you steal and be dishonest, you get nailed into something down there and all the times you are bad, equals how many nails go into you.  If you give the side eye to people (like everyone I know does on an almost daily basis and x15 for teenagers) you go down there, lose your eyes and come back as blind people.  That is fairly harsh, but wait, if you drink alcohol and cut up rough, you go down to hell and get burned alive (although I am picking you are already dead to go there).  If you just drink alcohol and sleep, you will be okay.  Then if you are a cheater, cheater, big fat cheater and you play around on your spouse, by go down there and get bits chopped off and wait for it…….you come back as a lady boy.  Our guides words, not mine.

One of the temples we went to was where the Tomb Raider was filmed and it has huge trees growing out of the temples and you can totally see how that has happened, with the rainforest being so lush around it.  The feats of engineering for 1000 years ago are quite astounding when you consider that these buildings were multi-storey and made from individual rocks that were carried from other parts of the country and pieced together, then decorated  and kitted out.  The fact that they are still standing today after being taken over by the forest twice, is also pretty incredible.

They also had quite large reservoirs of water in man made pools.  Obviously they don’t exist anymore, but to collect and keep large bodies of water like that, would have taken some ingenuity.

I would thoroughly recommend it.