Angkor Archeaological Park encompasses a sprawling area that was the heart of the ancient Khmer empire. Angkor Wat is the jewel of the park but it merely the largest of dozens of temples and other ruins left by the Khmers. Angkor Wat was maintained by Buddhist monks after the fall of the Khmers, but other temples are in various states of disrepair. Most were entirely swallowed by the jungle,but in the twentieth century the jungle was peeled away and many of the ruins were reconstructed using anastylosis, which is a process that basically involves tearing down a temple and then rebuilding it using mostly original pieces.
The breathtaking pictures of Angkor Wat you often see require a bit of elevation or really good lighting. In person it was like the Grand Canyon- very cool to see but not as impressive as the postcards. I like several of the temples we saw on the second day better, though that may have been more because we were able explore those at our own pace.
For the first day, we rented a guide and a tuk tuk and checked out the biggest and most famous of the temples - Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, and Bayon, Baphoun, and the Royal Palace inside of Angkor Thom. Angkor Thom is much bigger than Angkor Wat, but it's technically a city with mutiple temples, whereas Angkor Wat is a single temple, designed and built in one burst.
Our guide was good; he was a really short 27 year old, and he spoke decent English. He gave us oodles of information, but we moved pretty slowly through the temples. It would be like going through an art museum and being about everything. Sometimes you want to just wander quickly through and check out only the prettiest pictures.
On the second day, we rented bikes. Sam and I paid $2 each for the whole, while Anna splurge and spent $3, which she got extra perks like functioning brakes and gears. Sam's bike didn't really have brakes, and my bike was never able to shift gears; it also had only 1 and 1/2 pedals. But bikes were a great way to navigate the park. It's only 7km from the north side of Siem Reap to the entrance to park; you pedal furiously to minimize the amount of time on the busy roads, but especially in the afternoon (and especially in the monsoon) we nearly had some of the more distant ruins to ourselves.
We started at Banteay Kdei and Srah Srang, an artificial reservoir that is still full of water. My strongest memory of Angkor might be sitting on the stone remains of the pier, looking out on Srah Srang and the jungle beyond it, as 4 rambunctious Cambodian boys played next to me, pushing each other into the water. Also at Srah Srang we chatted with some little Cambodian girls - like every ruin, they are running around trying to sell you cold water, postcards, ornaments, and other trinkets. These ones spoke pretty good English, so we humored them and bought water from them. My girl, I think she called herself "cherry," started out:
Cherry: "Hello! Where you from?"
AJ: "America"
Cherry: "Oh, America! Capital Washington DC. Biggest city New York!"
They are well trained, I'll give them that. They also had some gems. When Anna refused to buy water from her girl upon exiting the temple, after brushing her away with a "maybe" twenty minutes before, she said, "You not like other Americans. You no keep your word!" and ran over to Sam and said, "Your friend not very nice"
We biked over to Pre Rup, and then biked out to Banteay Samre, the farthest temple on our agenda. It was a good 5 km east of everything else, but we somehow missed the turnoff and went a good klick too far. Amazingly, I was able to use the map on the inside of my Ancient Angkor book I had purchased to ID a hill and river to figure out where we were. We found it, and biked back to Pre Rup for lunch at a touristy place (only place we could guarantee vegetarian food for Sam). If I remember correctly, we then jogged up to East Mebon, and then it started to rain so we scratched Preah Khan and backtracked to see Ta Keo and Ta Nei. En route the rain transitioned to Monsoon, and with the wind whipping up off of Srah Srang we sought shelter in another restaurant, where we ran into our guide from the day before, at the head of a group of 26 Canadians. We waited out the rain, had banana smoothies and sticky rice with Mango (hey, why not?), and then hot tea b/c we were soaked and were getting cold.
Eventually the rain slackened and briefly lulled, so we headed back out to Ta Keo. Ta Nei was supposed to be a "nice jungle walk" away, and Anna had her mind set of giving it a try, so we followed what we thought was the correct walk; after a good 30 minutes of walking Anna enthusiasm disappeared, but I was insistent on find this temple because we were so committed. We encountered a few crossroads, so I would run ahead to investigate, with the curving jungle road either petering out or ending in a sketchy clearing (one of them looked like a lumber mill...). But on the last possible run Sam and Anna were going to allow me on, we found it! Triumph.
We backed back through Angkor Thom and by Angkor Wat and arrived back around dusk.
Went to a dinner w/ a free traditional show. We went out to the oldest pub in the hip area of Siem Reap, "Angkor What?", where I mistakenly ordered a pitcher of some girly mixed drink instead of a pitcher of the beer I wanted.
On day 3, we rented a car and driver for $45 and drove out to Beng Mealea and Banteay Srei, 2 ruins far from central Angkor. They were much farther than we expected, but were cool to see. Beng Mealea was super ruined, and we paid a local $5 to show us how to walk around the ruins without killing ourselves on unstable rocks. At one point I nearly walked through a huge web across a doorway, in which case I think our large spider friend would have bit me and I would have died on the spot, given the size of the spider.
We also visited a Landmine Museum, which was in honor of Aki Ra, a former child soldier and now minesweeper that you may have heard of.
We did a lot of shopping in Siem Reap, and I bought multiple "elephant pants," as we took to callig them. Sam bought similar "fat pants," and Anna bought some fisherman pants. Sam bought a knock-off backpack for her dad, which looked legit except for the fact that the brand name on the backpack cover didn't match the rest of the pack. Oops.
I wore my elephant pants out the last night, when we frequented our favorite sticky rice establishment. On my way over I was heckled by one of the tuk tuk drivers:
You want a tuk tuk? pause Or new pants?
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