Wat's It All About? Day Two at Angkor Wat.

On our second and last day in the Angkor Wat area, we visited the two major temple complexes--Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat.

The setting is very serene and beautiful.

Bayon temple in the Angkor Thom complex features multiple
towers carved on all four sides with huge faces. (Click for detail.)

They really reminded us of the giant Olmec heads we saw in the jungles in the Yucatan.

The bas-reliefs decorating every inch of the walls also looked
very much like the Mayan carvings in Tikal and Copan.

But the apsara dancers are distinctively Khmer.

So were Glyphs of Forbidden Actions.

Many of the ancient shrines are still used for worship
by the locals and by pilgrims from Thailand and India.

The Elephant Terrace was a reviewing stand from which
the king inspected his corps of war elephants.

The kings are gone, but the elephants are still here.

The elephants inspect P. and O.

A monstrous lion attacks an elephant.

At last, Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat was originally built as a Buddhist temple, but when
the king who built it died, his relatives beheaded the thousands
of statues of Buddha that decorated the walls and rededicated
the temple to Vishnu, whose statue is still a place of active worship.

During the Vietnam war, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge holed up in Angkor Wat,
using the temple as a hospital. There was some bomb damage, and these
bullet holes still remain. The Khmer Rouge also destroyed all the documentation
on the on-going reconstruction work, leaving archeologists with
a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of thousands of numbered stones and
no key to where they once stood. It took years of painstaking
computer work to reconstruct the reconstruction. Land mines and
continued guerrilla activity kept Angkor closed to tourism until the mid 1980s.

The walls of the main temple feature huge, intricately designed reliefs

depicting scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabarata.

We were especially taken with the carvings of Hanuman and his monkey
army fighting to rescue Sita.

All the other apsara carvings show them with closed mouths and
inscrutable smiles. These two are actually grinning. (Click for detail.)

This scene of an ancient BBQ shows the pig being slaughtered and
brochettes being roasted over an open fire. Yum.

That reminds me, I'm hungry.

For more shots of our adventures at Angkor, click below.

Day One.
Day Two.

P. & O.