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Actually it’s name is Angkor Wat, but the brain of a cruiser immediately made a connection.
Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Angkor Archeological Park encompasses an amazing number of millennium-old ruins of the Angkorian-era Khmer Empire (9th to 12th centuries AD). As a whole, this area is in a class with the Pyramids, Machu Pichu and the Taj Mahal.
For us, it became a long day, waking up at 4:00 in Kuala Lumpur for an early flight to Cambodia, and more specificially to Siem Reap, the gateway to the ruins. Long before noon, after having been first taken to the wrong hotel, we were already on our way to Angkor Wat, the most famous of the sites. We were riding a tuk-tuk, the local moped version of a motorized rickshaw – actually it is a two-wheel trailer hooked to a moped.
The rest of the day we explored several of the temple sites, including Bayon, Ta Phrom and of course Angkor Wat. This massive temple covers more than 1 km square and the lotus-like towers rise 65 metres from the ground (almost one Helsinki Stadium tower – see earlier blog: The real measure of hights). The walls of the temples are covered inside and out with thousands of bas-reliefs and carvings.
The giant stone faces of Bayon have become one of the most recogizable images connected to classic Khmer art and architecture (photo above – click on it), but we were particularly amazed by the jungle overgrowth at Ta Phrom, where massive fig and silk-cotton trees are taking over the temple. I’ve been told that this temple was used in the film Toomb Raider. Look at the photo (below), it’s almost as if that tree was a giant octopus, sliding down from above (click on it).
