Cambodia, Day 7: Siem Reap and the Return to Korea

On the first day of 2011, I broke my fast at Curry Walla with  vegetarian samosas, chicken vindaloo, and a mango lassi,. I tried to see an exhibit about Tonle Sap lake, but a blind young man explained that it was closed for lunch. I wouldn't have time to see it before my flight, so I moved on. I visited an otherwise boring modern temple that had a bone monument out front.

 I returned my bike. and decide to go to airport Eurasian hobo-style. When Traveling in Europe, Dan, Mark, and I saw a sign in the cheapest hotel in Budapest that stated, "The cheapest way to the airport is to walk," and that became a motto for us. However, this time intestinal distress convinced me to hire a tuk-tuk instead. At the airport I spotted a lizard and watched it as I ate a Dairy Queen blizzard. 

Once through security I sat down with a book. Kafka's the Trial is either the worst or best airport reading ever, depending on if you internalize K's struggles and weariness with mysterious opaque bureaucracy, or if you see the Zen lesson that it can only hurt you and bother you as much as you let it. 

The flight movie was Chinese version of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I didn't see the end because cut off at the climax for ten minutes of Qi exercise stretching video. 

About seven other foreigners teaching in Korea and I were the last ones left in Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport. We exchanged stories about our travels in Southeast Asia of them. Most of them had spent their winter break in Thailand. We all expected to just sleep on the chairs in the airport, but instead we were given one day visas to China and were provided with a complementary hotel. After some bureaucratic confusion, I end up at very western nice hotel, complete with flat screen tv, etched glass walls, etc. 

I roomed with only one other person who went to Cambodia; those who went to Thailand were also at a nice hotel but in a shitty (literally garbage covered – I saw the pictures) neighborhood.

Back in Korea the weather was once again seasonal, and I saw a Korean man with an awesome backpack on travels of his own.

Cambodia Day 6, Part 3: Prasat Krahom, Prasat Thom Ziggurat, and New Year's Eve

My day's temple tour finished with Prasat Krahom. At first it seemed to be another typical small temple, until I noticed that the brick tower was an entryway with two real doors instead of one actual door and one ornamental symbolic stone door. 

The tower looked much the same on the other side except for the scattered carvings at its feet.

Rows of fallen columns guided me through the temple. 

Some archways looked like they had been part of a giant game of Jenga. 

Fragments of statues were tantalizing glimpses into how the temple once would have appeared.

A golden ratio nautilus spiral was particularly fascinating: 

My excitement rose as I caught a glimpse of the enormous ziggurat, Prasat Thom, rising at the temple's end. Prasat Thom looks more Mayan or Aztec than Khmer, so it was a surreal sight rising over the rest of the temple. It took effort to take in the rest of the temple instead of rushing straight to the magnificent sight at the far end.  

The stairs up were closed - with good reason - and I decided not to insult the nearby monks or injure myself by testing my luck. 

I soaked in the massive pyramid, then wrenched myself away to explore the side wings of the temple that had reservoirs build into pleasant ponds surrounding the sub-temple grounds. 

Even there I kept staring at the ziggurat over the wall. 

I backtracked past the fallen pillars to eat late breakfast just outside the temple grounds. I went to admire the pyramid again as I ate and as I sat on a log and wrote afterward.

The motorcycle ride back was long enough to make me saddle sore sitting behind my guide. We stopped and got a pineapple at one point. I didn't realize I'd commissioned a work of art when I asked the woman at the small stand to cut it. She expertly removed all of the pips from the spines in a spiral pattern that maximized the edible fruit while removing everything one wouldn't want to eat.

Back at the guesthouse I took a nap and a shower. Part of why my room was so cheap was that the water was unheated, but in the extreme heat of the day cold showers were always welcome. At the Paper Tiger I ate fresh coconut, chicken curry cannoli, with a desert of mint and bluberry gelato in waffle cup with walnuts on top.

I didn't go to any of the New Year's Eve celebrations because they mostly seemed to be foreign tourists getting drunk. I did wake at midnight to fireworks, and I had a shockingly good view of them out my ground floor window. I somehow slept through most of the partying and music , but I did notice Radiohead's Karma Police playing at five in the morning. 

Cambodia Day 6, Part 2: Koh Ker Region Ruins

From Beng Mealea I had another long ride to Koh Ker area, which is even further northeast and closer to the border with Thailand. The temples here were some of the most inaccessible until the recent landmine removal and the construction of a toll road. 

My guesthouse guide - whose name I couldn't have spelled a the time and which I sadly can't remember now three years later - took me to a series of little monuments, which were mostly ruined. I didn't learn the names of most of the temples, but each stop did have its own character so I'll give them my own names. The Forest Temple was most notable for the trees that had used the brick towers as shortcuts to great heights.

The massive root system probably caused most of the cracks in the brick walls, but at this point they were also almost certainly all that was holding them together. 

The insides were fairly intact, with a small coverable pit that was probably used in rituals: 

The Temple of Smoke was notable for clearly being in current use, and for the blackened walls that were probably from smoke. The ground had been raked, and small nuts had been arranged into a symbol set before the approach to the temples. 

The shrine inside was set up recently.

I don't know if there was uncontrolled damaging fire, or if smoke from intentional firepits were enough to blacken the walls over the centuries, or if the walls were intentionally cleared of growth using fire.

The walls were blackened all the way around the building.

The next few stops were more ruined than not. The Temple of Animals had some carvings scattered around the area where a tower had fallen.

You can see my guesthouse guide behind the lion statues. He was rather shy and stayed out of the way after pointing out the temples. 

The Burning Temple had even more evidence of fire (and fire damage?). Again the leaves had been raked to make the temple grounds clear, though this time I could see the leaves in a burn pile. 

There were gaps in the remaining walls to the extent I was surprised that there was even that much standing.

The Mound Ruin was mostly interesting for contrast. Seeing how much temples can degrade in the jungle over the centuries made me astonished at how well the other temples were preserved. 

The Temple of Pillars and Linga was one of the largest temples we stopped at in the region. 

There were some interesting architectural and decorative elements that I hadn't seen anywhere else.

Some of the pillars were covered in writing.

The doorways were quite low, but that let me easily admire the ornamentation above them. 

This temple also had notable linga, the phallic fertility symbols of Shiva. 

One linga in particular was huge. 

Like the smaller linga I'd seen, the cylinder was inside an octagon inside a square.

When in use, water would have filled the square and flowed out a hole in the wall.

From the anonymous (to me) temples scattered throughout the forest we took off for Prasat Krahom and Prasat Thom, the jewels of trhe Koh Ker region.