I think with my stomach. I was waiting to find out what the included breakfast at our hotel would look like. Man, was I not disappointed! Dim sum!! It was a great start to the day.
Angkor Thom
Our first stop of the morning was the ancient Khmer capital city, Angkor Thom. We approached the city gates from the south, walking over the moat along a bridge lined with statues of the many faces of Buddha.
Angkor Thom was a huge city, which was founded in the late 12th century. The city walls are roughly 3 km long on each side, and at one time it’s estimated that somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people lived there. All the people—even the king—lived in wooden buildings. Only gods could live in stone buildings (the temples). All the wooden structures have long since disappeared.
We proceeded to the Bayon Temple, perhaps the most widely-seen structure in the complex. It’s famous for the smiling faces of Buddha on the many towers that made up the temple. (One estimate is that there were originally 54 towers, one for each province of the Khmer empire.)
We were able to climb up a few levels and walk amongst the towers…
… and in and out of dark passageways.
Just as striking as the massive towers of the temple were the incredible bas relief murals on the outer walls of the temple. These tell the stories of battles as well as showing what life was like for the inhabitants of the city.
The monumental scale of the intricate carvings was overpowering.
As we left the temple area, a lone monkey ambled up the pathway toward the temple.
Banteay Srei
Our bus took us about 45 minutes northeast of Angkor Thom to our next site, the 10th century Hindu temple of Banteay Srei.
This temple, dedicated to Shiva, is made of red and brown sandstone.
Because the rock is so soft, it could be deeply carved to make tremendously ornate bas relief decorations. It was incredible to think that these carvings were more than 1,000 years old and yet still looked so detailed.
After seeing the vastness of Angkor Thom, this temple seemed to be much more intimate and on a much smaller scale.
We went back to Siem Reap for lunch afterward, and then prepared for the challenge of our final temple of the day.
But first we had to change buses – an SUV smashed into ours just after we had gotten off at Banteay Srei!
Wat Thmey Killing Fields
While we were having lunch, our guides had a conversation and agreed that it would be a valuable cultural experience for us to stop for a few minutes at the Wat Thmey temple in Siem Reap. This temple was constructed to commemorate the Cambodians in the Siem Reap area who were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.
No one knows for sure how many people were executed outright or died from starvation or disease because of forced labor and horrible conditions. Our guide, Muy Choan, was born in 1968, two years before the war started. He told us, “We were lucky. My parents were illiterate rice farmers, so no one in my family was executed.” However, he lost his two older siblings to disease during the period of Khmer Rouge rule and the subsequent Vietnamese-sponsored government that pushed the Khmer Rouge out.
It’s unthinkable to imagine what Cambodians endured from 1970 to 1994, when peace was restored. A large proportion of the educated—even just literate—people were killed during the 1970s. Afterward, it was illegal to study English or French—only Vietnamese or Russian. Muy learned English in secret, in a Buddhist monastery.
Phnom Bakheng
Our final temple visit of the day was back in the Angkor area to the Phnom Bakheng temple. Visiting the temple requires walking up the Elephant Path, a long sloping dirt path that gradually takes you up the hill to the temple area.
Along the way we encountered offerings for the full moon that night. One family was placing bottled water, incense, candles, lotus, and flowers every 20 feet or so along the path for a couple hundred feet.
Finally, we rounded a curve and the temple came into sight in the late afternoon sun.
Some folks stayed behind on a platform in the shade, while the more foolhardy or intrepid of us charged on to climb the stairs to the uppermost platforms of the temple. Once we got up there, we had a great view of Angkor Wat in the distance.
There were more than 100 young Chinese sitting or lying in the shade of the tallest tower. They were hanging out there waiting for sunset, because this spot is renowned for the view of Angkor Wat in the light of the setting sun. The number of visitors allowed up onto the temple is limited to 300 at a time. While we were up there, a long line began forming at the base of the stairs. We had arrived just in time!
We were soaked with sweat at this point, from the steep climb and the heat and humidity. But it was well worth the climb. Two of our friends had taken an elephant ride up the hill! That would have been a great energy saver.
The walk back down the hill went quickly, as did the bus ride back to the hotel. We had enough time to get out of our sweaty clothes and shower. And while we were doing so, a big monsoon rainstorm rolled through. I wondered if the people on the peak at Phnom Bakheng had gotten wet!
We had a “Western-style” meal for dinner at the Elephant Polo Club restaurant — salad, green asparagus soup, pan-fried sea bass, and chocolate mousse. It didn’t take long to fall asleep after we got back to the hotel.