This temple is called Bayoun and it is the capital of Angkor Thom. The Angkor Wat area is actually a large area that has hundreds of temples. Angkor Wat is the most complete and biggest, but there are many others. Each new King would declare a new local capital and build a new temple to honor his kingdom. What makes this one, Angkor Thom unique is that it was so well fortified and pristine that it was used by several kings and just modified to fit each King’s liking. The faces are so cool!
The kids started making fun of Dad because he kept saying, “Just one more temple! Come on! This is Angkor Wat.” All the temples were looking the same to them. There was almost a mutiny in the tuk tuk, but when all the sight seeing was over, everyone was happy that we did this. In our defense, we were working on very little sleep and it was over 100 degrees one day. The only coffee I had all day was some acidy, brownish colored water in a flimsy plastic cup around 5:30am. So- I say we rocked it!
We got a well deserved break here when a guard said that there was age requirement of ten years
old to get to the top of the temple. Whew! Em could have gone, but chose to chill with us.
Think about this: while making these stone etchings, there was zero room for error. If a mistake was made, they’d have to start all over. Talk about pressure! There was a temple in Bagan (can’t think of the name) where the man in charge wanted the bricks to line up 100% perfectly- so much so that if there was room for something so fine as a hair to get through a space, he would chop off that worker’s finger(s.) Ouch.
Each wall tells a story and these walls are loooooong. They are actually more like corridors where elephants would walk along transporting goods and people.
These etching are on the walls lining Angkor Wat. It’s called bass relief and they tell the story of 8 great wars of the Angkor kingdom. They are 2 meters high and they are 8 different stories each 75 meters long. That’s 600 meters, longer than 6 soccer fields, all perfect in design and carving and still in pristine condition.
Everything in Angkor Wat is perfectly symmetrical, to the T. It faces perfectly east. On the equinox, the sun rises perfectly through the northern corridor. The huge moat surrounding the Wat is aligned perfectly and is still full and entact. Every detail is perfect. And it’s the biggest religious building in the world. Tireless attention to detail, constructed nearly 1000 years ago. Incredible!!
It’s kind of hard to see in the before and after images, but most of the roof had crumbled to the ground. They painstakingly, put it all back together with the original bricks. Wow!
This temple is called Ta Prohm and it’s the one used in the movie Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie. It has been left alone and is the reason for these huge trees growing into the walls. It almost seems fake when you see how these trees have grown. It’s also now a problem because when the trees die, they can fall over and rip up the walls.
This wat has portions of it where nature has taken over. The strangler trees have overpowered the temples that seem to have put up a pretty good fight over the years. The root systems of the trees are so massive that a lot of the temple walls have buckled and crumbled.
As you walk along paths to different wats, you see many large bricks scattered on the ground with numbers written on them. Putting these relics back together must seem like a never-ending puzzle. Today, they have machinery to help with the process- hundreds (almost a thousand years ago for some) all they had was man power!
More remnants of war. In Cambodia, between four and six million land mines are still in the ground ready to explode. Hundreds of people die each year from land mines. If someone has survived, it is usually at the cost of one or more limbs. Some of the musicians here were missing arms and/or legs. Some had also lost their eyesight.
marschmadness 