"The mighty Angkor"

Ever since I saw pictures of the Angkor temples I have been wanting to go there. When my grandma went there and took a DVD back home, it did not exactly give me less of a longing for the mystical and enormous temple ruins in the middle of the Jungle. As I mentioned in the previous blog post; the Angkor temples were one of my two target-destinations on this trip. (The other one is Machu Picchu.) For anyone attending any of Mr. Stevens' Spanish classes in California, this is not breaking news. Every time we would make up a story in class, I suggested that it went down in Cambodia, and several of the students in that class even mentioned Cambodia when they signed my yearbook. Now I was there, Siem Reap.

Throughout my journey I have seen many temples. If there is one thing I have learned on this trip, other than patience, it is that religion has had the most powerful impact on peoples all over the globe. Nothing I have seen, that including economic systems such as communism and capitalism, can get even close to the importance that religion has and is playing in peoples lives. The best witnesses of this are the temples. From the Russian Orthodox churches of St. Petersburg and Moscow, to the massive golden statues of Buddha in the Migjed Janrasing temple in Ulaanbaatar, the Great Mosque of Xi'an, the golden temples spread out all over Laos, and now the Angkor temples in Cambodia, I have seen the effort people are willing to invest in religion. And when it comes to the effort, there is really no question about what "wat"(temple) is the most impressive. Being the largest single temple complex in the world, the Angkor Wat remains as an outstanding monument and time machine, telling the tales of the largest preindustrial city in the history of the world. The word "Angkor" means "city", and the city stretched out over 1000 square kilometers, that is enormous compared to the second largest, which was the Mayan city of Tikal, which was just above 100 square kilometers. Even by modern standards the urban sprawl of Angkor was about the size of Los Angeles. The recent satellite images and scanning indicates that the infrastructure was more than capable to sustain over 1.2 million people.

Jayavarman II established the Khmer Empire in the 800's. The capital of his empire was located on the north end of the Tonle Sap lake, not too far away from the location of the Angkor temples. There are more than 1000 temple ruins spread out in the Angkor area, but most of them are only piles of brick today. Angkor Wat is the main temple of the period where the Khmer Empire was at it's top. Angkor Wat was built between 1113 and 1150, on request from the king Suryavarman II. He was a good king, both ecomoically, politically and military, and due to the success he was able to build Angkor Wat as his personal mausoleum. He built it as a traditional Hindu temple, but dedicated it to Vishnu in stead of Shiva, a move that was quite new in that time. The temple has also later been used as a Buddhist temple, then a hindu temple again, before Theravada Buddhism became the last religion to find it's place within the walls of Angkor Wat.

After Suryavarman's death, there was some internal disputes, and the Khmer did not manage to unite and fight the invaders from South Vietnam, who took advantage of the chaos and attacked. Jayavarman VII succeeded in uniting the Khmer again, and defeat the intruders in battles both on land and on the water. The time after this tuned out to be even more prosperous, and as the money flowed, Jayavarman built Angkor Thom, a walled city with the magnificent Bayon temple as the centre piece.

In the 1400's, the Khmer suffered from drought, and Thai invasions, and the city of Angkor was "evacuated" and the people moved down towards the area of today's Phnom Penh.

The city was left more or less untouched until the French found it in the late 1800. The archeologists started removing forest, securing some structures, and draining the temples in 1907. I can only imagine how it must have been like to walk in the rain forest and all of a sudden stumble over ruins like these. I would love to try it myself, and I am sure I could have found many ruins in the jungle around Angkor, but because of the heavy bombardment Cambodia was under during the Vietnam War, the area is not safe to off piste.

We arrived in Seam Reap early in the morning. After leaving our bags at a guest house, we rented bikes and started pedaling out to the temples. As we rode our bikes along a long dirt road we could see the sun rise above the horizon, but we already knew we would not be able to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat. When we got there we learned that we had to bike a few kilometers back along the paved road to buy admission tickets. We got on the bikes and did so. Except for the tourist buses we saw monkeys and a guy who sold us some easy breakfast. As we parked our yellow bikes, got the chain and lock out of the basket mounted to the handle bar, small girls approached us to let us know that we could park the bikes there for free if we bought water from them. We already had water, so we just parked our bikes, promising that we would buy from them if we were out of water on the way back. When we did come back, and did not need water, they said to Paul: "You buy water, you liar, you f***ing man!" I am sure that many tourists think they have to buy water to park their bikes, or maybe feel bad for these girls, so they are not used to be turned down.

There are disputes between scholars when it comes to the reason for buiding such enormous moths around the temples. Surrounding Angkor Wat is a large, perfect rectangular moth, pointing exactly north south. Some say that this moth was used as a reservoir built to irrigate the rice fields around the temple. Others say it is to simulate the lake surrounding the mountain where they believed the Hindu gods to live. To get inside the temple complex we had to cross the moth. This was easy, as we could just walk across the massive stone bridge. As soon as we came through the walls of the outer ring, and into the complex, we realized that the front of the Wat was coverd with some kind of ugly green plastic. They were working on restoring the temple, like anywhere where there are old buildings. This was a bit of a disappointment, but it was soon forgotten as we started walking down the inner walls of the temple. All around the outside of the ring, which really is enormous buildings, there are relief pictures, carved out in the stone. Most of them showing battle scenes, but some showing the agricultural life of normal people. Some even show how the temple was built, and that has helped the historians a lot when it comes to determining what tools was used and how they built the temples. There must be more than one kilometer with reliefs like this, and they must have been carved out after the large stones were placed. We can only imagine the pressure for precision the monks and workers who did it must have been under when they carved the vivid battle scenes into the stone.

To get up in the towers, you needed to wear a shirt covering the shoulders, and pants covering the knees. Paul wore a singlet, so he had to stay down, but I climbed up the steep stairs, wondering how many people had died from falling down these stairs. The view up there was amazing. I could look out over the tree tops surrounding the temple, and look down at the whole complex. The inside of the temple seems a lot bigger when you are up there than when you are on the ground, and as I was walking around in there I came across two of the four Buddha statues that are supposed to be up in he tower.

After walking around in the rest of the temple complex, we found one of the walls along the outer ring to be almost vacated, so we sat down, just relaxing for a while, talking about the magnitude of the work that was done there. And the fact that they used less than 50 years to build it is unbelievable. They must have had so many workers being so good organized, they would have needed perfect planning and management, making sure that the different rocks made it to the site, and to the right spot, at the right time. Even modern computerized logistics programs would have a hard time keeping everything in the right place.

After visiting the Angkor Wat we biked up to Angkor Thom, and after letting some elephants and a bus exit the ruins, we entered the massive gates. Coming out on the other side we could already see the Bayon. The Bayon is not preserved as well as the Angkor Wat, but it makes it more mystical when there are some rocks that are laying scattered around the temple. (I believe that Angkor Wat was similar before the French archeologists started excavating and moving things around.) We took a couple pictures on the outside before we started climbing the ruins. The Bayon was the main temple of the most prosperous era of the Khmer Empire (Jayavarman VII), and you could tell. The massive faces they built on all towers must have taken ages to build. The stairs to climb up to the main chambers of the temple were so steep that a lot of people stayed down there. I wonder how the monks did without falling down centuries ago, or maybe the did? There was no evidence of railings (like there is now), so after rain the stairs must have been a death trap.

After The Bayon we headed back into Siem Reap to have some food. This was by far the warmest day of my trip, and there was absolutely no wind. Biking along the pavement road this time, we saw the guy we bought some kind of pastries from on the way out to the temples and had some real food when we got to town. After taking a short break buying tickets to Bangkok and checking our e-mail, we got back on our bikes again, hoping to get to Angkor by sunset. After the morning rides our butt cheeks were hurting really bad, and even before we started the second trip to Angkor we knew it could only get worse since we were racing. The trip was supposed to be about 9 kilometers. In a race against the sun we had some of the best fun we had had on the trip that far. As we were passing TukTuks and busses on the road, running red lights and chasing each other, we kept yelling about how we would beat the sun. This is what it was down to. Two men, two bikes, and the good old sun. We did intervals leading, trying to pull each other up, while the other was resting in the luxury of lower air resistance. The sweat was dripping, and the bikes were breaking records. As we approached the Angkor Wat moth, I coxed a power 20, jut like in the middle of a race in rowing. We were now sure we would make it, and not even the monkeys running down the side of the road could make us loose the race. There was no way we would loose that race. The sun was ours now, and as it was setting we would tuck it in real good, and make sure it would fall asleep before we headed home.

We put the Angkor Wat far behind us, going by several other, turned away from the Sras Srang lake and the Banitaey Kdei temple, going straight for Ta Prohm, the temple I wanted to see most off all. I had asked a man in Siem Reap, and he told me that I could see the sunset from that temple, so I would hit the jackpot if I could see both the temple and the sunset. About three kilometers from the temple entrance, Paul's chain broke, and he had to stop. I hit the breaks as hard as I could, and came to a stop about 30 meters down the road. Paul was shouting: "Go on without me, go, go, go!" I replied with an exhausted voice: "No man left behind!". But when Paul assured me that it was better if I went and got some pictures, I picked up some speed and raced towards the Ta Prohm. When I made it there, I realized that the lock for the bike was in Paul's basket. I took the padlock off of my backpack and hooked it around the chain of my bike, so no one could bike away with it. According to the people coming out of there, it was about a 20 minutes walk to get to the best ruins. As I thanked them I was already running down the paths, taking me deep into the jungle, looking for temples. I made it in there in about six or seven minutes, shooting photos as I ran. Since the sun was setting, the ruins were about to close, so there was almost no people there, just enough to have some of them take some photos of me. Since there was so little people there, I could jump the fences and climb up on the ruins that were closed off to the public. Most of them because of the danger of them collapsing, but it was worth taking the risk. There were stones laying around everywhere, and I tried to step only on the stones without carvings. That turned out to be quite difficult, as most of them were carefully inscribed with text or pictures. Seeing how the jungle had overtaken the temples of the once greatest civilization on earth was a reminder of how fragile the societies around the world are also today. I live like nothing will change, but it will. As I have written about in my blog entries about China, the world I was born into 20 years ago, with the United States as a superpower, with Norway as a safe and rich country, will not last forever. I do believe that Norway will do alright during my life time, but the US is balancing on the with of a tread from a spider's web.

I am not going to give detailed descriptions of the temples, as that would be too difficult, but I do hope you watch the pictures. I did take many, but they are all quite unique.

As I ran through the temples I could see the sun going down behind the trees, knowing that the man in town probably did not understand what I pointed at on the map. That did not matter just then. I had such a peaceful and quiet visit at Ta Prohm that I could not care less about seeing the sunset at the temples.

By the bikes I met a German and an American guy. We biked back together, but Paul was no where to see. It turned out he had gotten help from some local kids who insisted on pushing his bike for him, and even wanted him to sit on it while they did (he did not do that). They took him to a bike repair shop, and he bought a new chain for one dollar. Me and the other guys biked out on the highway, thinking it would be faster. It turned and we ended up going quite far in the wrong direction, but we did encounter a night food market. After a fantastic noodle dish on a carpet at the side of the road, we biked into town, and I found Paul at the Garden Village Guesthouse. That was where we stayed, and he had arrived minutes before me.

After a shower we had dinner, checked out the night market, and had another dinner, we had bought a bunch of souvenirs, and I had acquired a large sand painting. I had been looking for a unique painting for ages, but everywhere they looked at a picture and made tens of them. I bargained it down a lot, but ended up paying enough to give the saleswoman a profit. I was very happy about the purchase, and I carried the painting in a complementary tube made out of palm leaves.

Even if Angkor Wat somewhat disappointed me, the rest of the temples delivered, and the total experience of the Angkor temples was great. I will for sure come back here and spend more days, taking one area at the time.