Angkor Wat

We met up with Matt and Nile at the airport in Saigon, and flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Our primary, and really only, reason for going to Siem Reap was to go to Angkor Wat.

I have to admit, that before deciding to go on this trip, I had never even heard of Angkor Wat. When I asked Matt and Nile, and they said "It's one of the wonders of the world. A World Heritage Site. Ancient temples in the jungle...." well, that was enough to sell me on it.

The site is really known as the temples at Angkor, with Angkor Wat being the most famous temple, and so most people just refer to the whole site as this.

The site is the location of a series of capital cities for the Kmer empire in the 9th to 15th century. There are supposed to be remains of over 1000 temples here!

We, like most other tourists, started our tour at Angkor Wat.



Angkor Wat is supposed to be the world's largest single relegious monument. It started out as a Hindu temple, changed to a buddist temple, and then the buddist images were mainly destroyed with the Hinduism revival when it switched back to a Hindu temple.

The walls surrounding the temple are about 1/2 mile on each side, and are covered in carved reliefs.


Most of the reliefs depict Hindu cosmology--they tell stories of different gods and events. I was the tour guide for our group for most of the temples here (with my knowledge entirely coming out of our Lonely Planet guide). I had great training with Sara in Spain on our walking tours, and everyone said they appreciated it and that I did a good job, but it was somewhat difficult with no knowledge of Hinduism.

The tours went something like "And then the god, with the really long name that starts with A was attacked by someone with a really long name that starts with P.....". Some of the images on the wall made it easier to refer to the gods "And then monkey head-chicken legs got very angry..." Maybe because I was calling him monkey-head-chicken-legs?

This relief is part of a story called "the churning of the ocean of milk". It's a rather complicated story involving a serpant wrapped around a mountain, with gods pulling on it from one side (seen here....)

and demons pulling on the other side, making the mountain move and causing the sea of milk to be churned......then the mountain starts to sink and another god becomes a turtle to support it on it's back? There's a nectar of immortality involved in there somewhere too.....

By this point we were really hot (this was a trend throughout our trip to Cambodia), and figured we'd got the point, so we moved on.

No big story with these windows, I just liked the way they looked....


Many of the reliefs on the walls are of Apsaras. The Apsaras are female spirits, or fairies, and are often depicted dancing, and are associated with fertility.



The apsara dance is a traditional Cambodian dance now. We went to an Apsara dance performance in Siem Reap. The dances tell stories and involve many subtly different hand and foot positions. The art was nearly lost when the During the rule of the Kmer Rouge, and has somewhat been revived by copying the movements seen carved into the walls on the temples.