AngkorWat — Jim Winslett

I’m overwhelmed. I’d heard of Angkor Wat. I’ve seen pictures. I’m going to show you pictures here. It won’t matter.

Until you’ve been there, nothing is going to convey the enormity and majesty of this place in any real sense.

I should start at the beginning. I know I said this in the last post, but now that it’s daylight, I can verify that Viking knocked it out of the park with this hotel. It’s gorgeous.

Remember: you can click any photo to see it fully on your screen without scrolling

We had breakfast out by the banyan tree.

One of the more interesting things at breakfast was fresh jackfruit. It tastes a little like durian, but without the stench.

Then we hopped on the bus and headed for Angkor Wat. It’s huge. We arrived to the usual camp of tents with locals selling cheap souvenirs where the buses park, followed by a camp of buildings where locals sell cheap souvenirs. After a long walk, we could finally see the towers of the temple.

The temple is surrounded by a moat. The original bridge across the moat is being restored, so they had temporary, floating footbridge supplied by Canadian company Candock. It felt squishy when I walked on it, kinda like a bouncy castle.

And that just gets us across the moat to the outer buildings of the temple. Even the out-buildings are impressive, though.

The outer buildings were also where we first met the monkeys who live here (look closely - near the bottom left)

The monkeys scampered and played all around the buildings while our guide talked and talked. I had a very difficult time understanding him, so I would often give up and wander off to take more pictures rather than sit in one place trying to understand what I was hearing. (One example: he told us on the bus about a person named “Chaddaga”. I eventually figured out he was saying “Charles Du Galle”) That’s not a dig at him - when people in non-English speaking countries learn English, they learn it with the pronunciation and accent of their teacher, who is often a local rather than a native speaker. We’ve had a wild variety of dialects and pronunciation differences from guides on this trip.

Beyond the outer buildings, we had a better view of the main temple, still quite far away.

The whole complex was built over a period of 28 years in the early 1100’s as a Hindu temple to the god Vishna. However, the king who ordered it built died before it was finished and work stopped soon after. Some years later, an invasion gave Cambodia a new king who was Buddhist. He moved the capital city and built two Hindu temples (we’ll get to those in a minute). Angkor Wat was gradually converted from a Hindu temple to a Buddhist one during that king’s reign.

In a pond near the main temple, we noticed the lotus flowers were in bloom.

Hey, did you know that lotus are edible? Not the flower (I don’t think… perhaps they are) but the seeds. I’m sure you’ve seen lotus seed pods in dried flower arrangements, but until today I’d never seen one that wasn’t dried.

The little hole is where the seed I ate came from. It has a nice flavour, something like a cross between a peanut and a bean sprout. But I digress. Back to the temple. By now, we’ve gotten to the main temple area and we couldn’t be happier. It’s incredibly hot and humid here and our feet are aching, but we’re smiling anyway.

Most interior walls of the main temple are covered in carved or etched reliefs. It’s a bit overwhelming. Everywhere you look, there are things to see that demand more time than we have. At first, I thought this pillar had an ornate floral design, but on a close look, there are gods here.

Many of the reliefs surrounded the four pools where a worshipper was supposed to cleanse themselves before ascending to the higher levels of the temple.

The highest tier contains the large structure with multiple towers. It’s really impressive and it’s not going to translate well in a photo, but here’s a picture anyway:

If you want to go even higher and explore the top of the temple, you have to navigate some pretty steep stairs. The view from up there is great, though.

You still have to get back down, though. That was far worse than the climb up!

Rob and I decided to break off at this point and find a washroom, rather than wait for the remainder of our group to get back down. It was another long walk and I’m not entirely sure the end result was what we were hoping for, but it would have to do.

We found a little refreshment place called “Angelina Jolie 1” and had a couple of watermelon smoothies (delicious) and enjoyed sitting down for a bit while we waited for the group to catch up. Then we bid adieu to Angkor Wat and headed back down the long road to the bus.