Day 3 – Thursday 18th of December –  Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and a bit more

The day is here! The day is here! This is why we came this far! Angkor ruins await us just past the horizon.

The morning started with an early, and I really mean early, wakeup at 4am (11pm back in Finland) with my eyes crossed. The only thing that got me moving at all was the excitement and a hot shower, though I did not have time to spend as long there as I would have wished. At 4:30 we were already gathered to the yard where Jimbo was waiting us with his trusty tuk and we took of to see one of the most awesome sites in the human history.

A bit before 5am we had reached the “gates” of Angkor area where the ticket sales booths stood, ready to receive the hordes expecting to see a spectacular sunrise at Angkor Wat. The queues were building up fast but we were fortunate enough to have arrived early enough to be among the first ones to get the tickets for the day. The tickets cost $20 for a day pass – which is barely enough to get a glimpse of the main sites, but as we were a bit short on time it was the option we had to settle with. As a funny detail, they took a photo of the person buying the ticket and printed it onto the ticket alongside the dates the ticket is valid. My wild guess is that this is done to prevent resales or transfer of the tickets.

Site 1 – Angkor Wat

Once we got to Angkor Wat, the bleak truth about all this sunrise hype struck us, and hard. The people were pouring onto the area by the hundreds and the “best spot to see the sunrise” alongside the pool was so tightly packed that it almost killed my excitement. And along the tourists came the coffee shop clerks buzzing among the poor outsiders like a cloud of blood sucking mosquitoes. Atop of this, the morning proved to be somewhat cloudy so the sunrise ended up being somewhat less noticeable than it would be on a clear day. All in all quite an anticlimax, but gladly things were to get better… but before that one of our troupe had to be conned by a cafeteria owner to pay $7 for a do-it-by-yourself style baguette and a small soda. Never the less, we had a pleasant stroll among the exquisite statues, carving and hallways of the temple.

It would have taken ages to study all the reliefs – of which it would seem that some are a newer reproduction, though I am not sure about that. Though the ones we managed to study were masterfully carved and ranged from palm sized to almost life-sized. It was also weird to see the unique Khmer mix of Hinduism and Buddhism co-existing in the same monument. In some spots it was even possible to see glimpses of the colours that have once been covering the halls of that magnificent place. It was really mind blowing to imagine the place in its full glory. The only sad part was that we did not manage to visit the still operational temple atop of the building as it did not open before we headed back to our tuk-tuk and towards the next location.

On the way back we stopped for a few photos of the temple monkeys on the causeway that connects the temple and the gate. We also did a small tour of our own outside the main tourist routes, just to find a small community hidden inside the ancient temple – with it’s own rudimentary Buddhist temple and cooking places.

Site 2 – Angkor Thom – Bayon

We entered the Great City itself, Angkor Thom, trough the south gate and past the 50 something devas and asuras flanking the entrance bridge – just as majority of tourists do.

Our first stop was at the center of the city at the temple that was once the heart of this buzzing capitol, Bayon. The Bayon is of much simpler design than the nearby Angkor Wat, but what it loses in design (and size) it wins back with the ever so memorable stone faces. They seem to  be everywhere, forever vigilant and always smiling.

The temple itself had funny shady alcoves and pillared basements. Yet on the upper floors – there were 4 floors on the building itself if my memory serves me correct, each one being higher than the floors on modern day buildings – were spacious and bathed in the light of the morning sun. The temple mountain building style was also more evident here than in Angkor Wat, with steep, narrow stairs leading from the base to the next level and to the one after that, all the way till the main temple room at the summit.

It was also at the Bayon that we realized how huge the trees in here are: one could not reach around one of em, nor would the length of all our hands joined be enough for the largest ones either!

Site 3 – Angkor Thom – Terrace of the Elephants & Terrace of the Leper King

Our breakfast/lunch spot ended up being somewhat north of the Bayon, in the area bordering two huge artificial ledges – called Terrace of the Elephants and Terrace of the Leper King.

The food was once again expensive as hell and much to our surprise we were met with only sticks and spoons as utensils – for the first time on this trip. I opted for a local take on the continental breakfast including friend eggs and chicken, salad and greens, steamed rice and french fries. The plate was piled full and much bigger than the others in our group of idiots had, though it was still hardly worth the cost ($7). Back home it would be a bargain, but in here, not so much. At the least it was good and filling – when seasoned with a hefty dose of chili sauce ofc!

The terraces themselves were not much more than artificial ledges. The point being that they have once been the front porches of the royal palace – which has spanned wast area behind the Elephant Terrace – and of the royal crematorium – located behind the Leper King Terrace. If we would have been better informed about where we were we might have understood the importance of these locations, maybe. But we did not realize what they were until after the tour and thus missed the palace area and it’s couple remaining temples. In conclusion, we thought that the point was to guide us through yet more of sales stalls of the ever so persistent locals selling all sort of junk: from hats to pants and from postcards to bottle openers. Never the less, our resident photographer managed to snap a few cool shots of small funnel spiders while there, so not everything was wasted!

Site 4 – Prasat Ta Keo

Ta Keo was a short ride outside Angkor Thom through the Victory Gate on the road starting from the former main doors of the royal palace. We thought that this would be just a short stop as we had already seen a temple mountain of this era at the Bayon. Yet again Cambodia fooled us!

As soon as we reached the front of the temple it became clear that a) this temple is a lot older than the ones in Angkor Thom or the Angkor Wat, and b) the architecture in this temple is quite much more radical than elsewhere. And by radical I mean that the temple is dominated by extremely steep steps that lead all the way to the summit, almost without pauses. Notable is also that the summit is a good deal higher than on the other temple mountains we saw. So the view over the treetops was quite well worth the climb (which seemed to be hard for even the sportiest of visitors as everyone who got to the top was panting like a dog on a hot summer day.) A difference that we felt in our feet was also that there were no modern wooden stairs build atop of the old stone ones (to protect em), but we had to climb up and down using those old stairs, where each step was knee high or even higher.

If things were to get this much cooler by every temple visited, things were to get super interesting soon!

Site 5 – Prasat Ta Phrom

And they did!

Or well, before that we had to grab some liquid refills from the booths outside the west entrance to the Ta Phrom monastery. And as soon as we got out of the tuk-tuk, a young – maybe 8 years old – girl glued onto me trying to sell me some post cards. I did not have heart to tell her to go away or to start haggling about the price, though I was not interested at buying em with the price asked. She begged and begged, and eventually I did give in enough to promise to buy the cards from her (and none else) after we got out, if I started feeling like I could need some. A promise that has haunted me ever since…

Ta Phrom is cool place – both in temperature and in the atmosphere. The ruins are shaded by the jungle that still grows through the ruins in many places – this balance has been kept intentionally in order to show people the condition things were in before the ruins were found and restored. Thus the monastery is under the shade provided by the enormous trees growing there and thus the temperature is quite a lot more bearable than on the open area. The trees also give the whole place this weird eerie feeling, kinda like a place that even time itself has forgotten, a place where nature and man made things live in harmony, just like they have lived for the past thousand years.

We managed to explore the area quite a lot before we faced a catastrophe, we got separated into two groups… and with my phone having ran out of power a tad bit earlier, there were no means of communicating in between the groups. For the beginning we did just wander around exploring things on our own, but later on when the time to leave came, things got messy… As we exited and made sure that the other group had not returned, me and my friend decided to go looking for the missing ones on our separate ways and to return to the start at certain time… Nope, we did not get lost as well, but it took us four different tries and like an hour to locate the missing idiots. I personally marched through the monastery zig zagging back and forth, and while doing so ended up discovering at the least as much new places (for me) then what we had found in the past 2 hours in Ta Phrom. Those places included for example a huge walkway leading from the monastery to the east, many hidden alcoves with Buddha statues and sometimes locals worshiping them, and some other super cool places.

That place is huge! And any maze builder could be proud of the paths and alcoves in there. It is quite comparable with a big modern university (which Ta Phrom has been in addition to being a monastery) in size.

On the way back I was so tired that I hoped that the lil girl would not spot me again (though it is likely that she had already forgotten my promise anyways). Later on I have regretted this, as I have come to think that I would wish to have some post cards from Cambodia… but a promise is a promise…

Site 6 – Banteay Kdei

By the time we reached Banteay Kdei we were all worn out and feeling darn tired, but we still decided to take a small stroll around the compound as Jimbo had stopped here for the last bit of the tour and we did not dare to ask him to take us straight back to the hostel. And it was good that we didn’t, even in the worn out state we were in, we could appreciate the moat filled with the leaves of sacred lotus and other kinds of water lilies. The temple itself was in a tad bit poor shape with a lot of it being propped up with supporting pillars and beams. As before, the reliefs were wonderful in here and the architecture in the series of small connected chambers was rather darn interesting. That being said, we prolly did not spend more than 30-40 mins there due to exhaustion.

The evening after Angkor

After getting back and thanking Jimbo of the wonderful tour, we hid the bunks for a while, before heading out for some fodder, shopping and some watering hole to quench our thirst in.

Sadly I remember very little of the beginning of the evening before we hit the bar.

In there we did though enjoy our fair share of the $1.5 cocktails and $0.50 beers before heading out to find the last of our “must see” locations. The strawberry daiquiris in that place were heavenly, though we noticed that the bar increased the amount of alcohol in the drink after each consecutive round we ordered. By the end of the third cocktails things did not taste that good anymore and we headed off for the final hunt in Siem Reap. After some bad map reading in my behalf and a couple wrong turns, we finally made it. The glorious Pippeli Pensione was rising over us – the rough translation for what it sound like in Finnish could be Weiner Mansion. The rest of our group had been possessed by that place ever since we saw it in the list of accommodation possibilities in Siem Reap… to be honest, it was not as funny, nor as fancy as we thought it would be… But we atill got some “funny” drunk photos in front of their sign…