angkor wat, cambodia

I thought these windows kind of looked like big picture frames. I thought it would be funny to take cheesy “family photos” but only Lennon and Maddux agreed to participate.

It’s fun to walk around and envision what life was like for people hundreds of years ago. This was their Capitol, their theaters, their market, their hub. Some of the temples were protected by moats and/or large man made lakes so that no enemy could get anywhere near the main city. The perfection in the architecture is awesome. The attention to detail – unbelievable.

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.

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.