Monks, Monkeys, and Spiders. Oh, My!

On our last afternoon in Phnom Penh, we visited the royal palace.

There were monks.

And monkeys.

And topiary.

Objects of worship.

Including this shrine to, uh, Emmett Kelly, I guess.

And amazing murals depicting scenes from the Ramayana.

A lovely end to our week in Cambodia.

We had one last dinner with Justin and Jyoti before they left for the beach at Sihanoukville and we headed for Saigon.

And what would a celebratory dinner be without a plate of crispy tarantulas to start?

P.

Bugs! They're What's For Lunch!

Our Angkor adventure over, we left Siem Reap and took the express bus back to Phnom Penh. Three hours into the trip, we stopped for lunch to be confronted by all manner of roadside deliciousness. All manner, as long as you're hungry for insects:

Deep-fried cicadas.

We've had these in Mexico. They're crunchy and nutty, but better
rolled in a tortilla with guacamole and chiles.

Who could resist a snack bag of mixed beetles?

Especially with plenty of chile and green onion.

Unfortunately, we'd already gorged on this lovely box lunch.
Next time we'll know better.

P.

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.

Wat's Up? A Dream Come True.

Angkor Wat is a site O. and I have dreamed of visiting for most of our lives. I can remember as a kid seeing pictures of these fantastically overgrown temples in the middle of the jungle and thinking that I had to go there some day. So our being here is really a dream come true for both of us.

It's taken a while to put this post together because of the sheer volume of photos and also because we didn't have them all. On day one of our two days in the area, as I started to take pictures of the temples, I realized that the camera battery was almost depleted. Luckily, we were with our friends Justin and Jyoti, who just happened to have scheduled their Tet vacation in Angkor Wat for the same few days as we did. So after we got back to Hanoi, we downloaded some of their photos to supplement ours. Their photos are marked with a (J).

The spires of Angkor Wat tower over the trees of the surrounding forest.

The temple is surrounded by a huge moat that served as a water source as well as protection.

On the first day we decided to visit four of the lesser temples,
Preah Khan, Neak Pean, Ta Som, and Ta Prohm since Justin and Jyoti
had already visited the main temple complex the previous day.

The setting is more forest than jungle. It has a much more park-like
feeling than Tikal in Guatemala.

The first of many depictions of gods and demons wrestling with the
five or seven-headed naga. This motif is repeated endlessly throughout
all of the temples in the area.

Garuda is everywhere, too.

There are at least a dozen major temples in the area in various stages of decay or restoration.

The temple of Ta Prohm is one of the most overgrown. It's the one
you've probably seen in photos. Several scenes from
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider were filmed here. (J)

The next few pictures show how the roots of trees are slowly becoming one with the ruins.
(J)

For obvious reasons, this one is called the Snake Root.
(J)

(J)

(J)(J)

Some of these trees are massive.
(J)

We stopped for lunch and much needed refreshment. (J)

P. found a feline buddy. Unlike in Vietnam, the cats in Cambodia
were friendly and not semi-feral.

P. & O.