What Ankgor?

February 17th, 2010 by Sarah & Brian

Our first stop in Cambodia was at the town of Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat. I hadn’t even heard of Angkor until we started reading books about the area. Ín any case, nothing prepares for you for such a place. What you see, walking in the heat around a huge area, is the remains of an ancient city which was the centre of a Kymer empire, Angkor,  which included all of Laos and Thailand, for 500 years.  The site is vaster than anything in Rome or Greece and you cannot walk around it in fact – you have to have transport of some kind even to see a fraction.The ruins were half hidden by jungle until a Frenchman discovered them in the mid 19 century – of course, the locals knew they were there all along. But his publicising led to the French investing time and money over many years to hack back the jungle and restore many of the buildings. Today this enormous site is one of Cambodia’s chief attractions for international tourists, mainly from Korea and China.   Siem Reap has developed into a service centre for the site with massive concrete hotels with names that include ‘palace’ and ‘dream spa’ in the title. As our young guide said to us, ‘Without tourists, Cambodia is dead’.

Angko Wat is the main temple. Like the other ruins, it is impressive rather than beautiful, a strange heavy building with shapes and symbols that are hard to understand. The sandstone has darkened with time as if it has been covered in soot or other industrial pollution.But inside there are bas relief  murals over several walls that are truly lovely  – finely detailed, symmetrical in design, suggestive of  fluid movement and showing the story of a complicated myth or a king’s life, carved out of stone by hundreds of artisans working together. They were created at the time in history when the British were fighting each other out of simple castle structures.

We tried to see a few of the other temples, as many as we could manage on a punishingly hot day, and climbed some very steep steps to see the sunset from one on a hill, but it is these delicate and magical paintings in stone which I will remember.

Last 5 posts by Sarah & Brian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Vietnam Orphanage.

A Global Volunteer Network Initiative: http://www.volunteer.org.nz