Angkor Temple Hopping

 

We travelled to Siem Reap in Cambodia to explore the ancient Angkor temples, one of the world’s greatest heritage sites. On previous journeys we had seen the ancient monument of Borobudur, the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu and many of the old cathedrals of Europe and we weren’t too sure how they would compare. But Angkor certainly more than lived up to its reputation.

The Angkor temples are near the Cambodian town or Siem Reap, and the large number or temple sites occupy a large land area. To see them all would have taken at least two weeks. We had only four days there. So before we left Auckland we had narrowed it down to the temples we’d most like to visit, and how we’d travel between the temples, as they can be several kilometres apart. We used our local library which had several guidebooks on the area, including Dawn Rooney’s Angkor guide.

From New Zealand we flew directly to Siem Reap with Malaysia Airlines, with a three hour wait at Kuala Lumpur airport, thus avoiding a Phnom Penh stopover.

Our first task was to purchase our Angkor pass (we got a 3 day pass for $US40 each) from the ticket booth in town. We needed to both appear in person to be photographed, and our electronic images formed part of the tickets. Our Angkor passes would be checked before entering each site. As the 3 day tickets could be used from 5pm on the day before they actually started, our tuktuk driver then took us to Angkor Wat, the closest (5km from Siem Reap) and largest, temple for a brief look at what we would see the next morning.

Angkor Wat, built 900 years ago, is the best preserved temple. The central temple, on three levels, covers 9 hectares. We spent about four hours there after a dawn start on our first morning. There were quite a few other tourists, but the size of the temple soon spread everyone out.

In the evening, a main attraction for tourists is to scramble up a nearby temple hill to watch the sun set over Angkor Wat. We avoided the crowds and wandered instead through the nearby Banyon temple almost on our own. This tranquility was a great contrast to the hordes, along with buses and elephants, on this site earlier in the day.

We chatted with our tuktuk driver and agreed on another early start the next morning, this time at the man-made lake of Srah Srang. We were the only tourists looking out over the lake to watch the sun rise, along with few local kids there, hassling us for money which was unusual in Siem Reap.

After we’d watched the sun’s orange globe appear from behind the clouds we walked through the nearby temple of Banteay Kdei to arrive at the overgrown Ta Prohm temple, featured in the Temple of Doom movie. This temple was rediscovered by the French in 1947 and large numbers of trees still grow through the ruins creating an eery jungle like atmosphere.

To return many of these temples to their former glory a massive reconstruction effort is still on the way in many of these temples, with a great deal of overseas expertise and financial assistance as well as local knowledge and labour. It’s fascinating to see how huge piles of temple rubble are being reassembled and broken sculptures mended or replaced.

On our last day of temple hopping we travelled to the small temple of Banteay Srei, some 30 Km from Siem Reap. While many guide books indicate that the best way to get there is by car, we had a lovely trip travelling in the open air in our tuktuk and felt a little smug as we passed small tour groups of perspiring cyclists. The road to Banteay Srei is fully sealed, and passes through many small villages in the otherwise open Cambodian countryside.

Banteay Srei was crowded with Japanese tour parties taking snapshots of each other striking poses beside the sculptures, but it was well worth the visit to see the detailed stone work and the beauty of the temple.

Four days of intense temple hopping seemed barely enough, there was so much more to see. The temples built hundreds of years ago by the ancient Khmer civilisation, have a mix of both Hindu and Buddhist religions. These are seen not only in the main structures, but also in the highly detailed bas relief walls found in many of the temple, that show early Khmer battles, apsara dancers and many scenes of daily life. (One of which very clearly shows a dog being placed in a large cooking pot!).

We didn’t use a guide on our temple trips. Our hotel lent us an excellent guidebook (Ancient Angkorby Freeman and Jacques) which we later bought. However many guides were available had we felt the need for one. We loved walking around at our own pace and taking our time to really look.

We visited Angkor in March, and the afternoon heat (up to about 34C) did limit our temple visits to the mornings and early evenings. (It was a good excuse to use the hotel pool). It is a bit cooler from November to February, while the rain from June to October could make tuktuk travel, and temple wandering, a little moist!

We could have spent a few more days here, as any one of the 50 or so Angkor temples would be a major attraction if it was on its own anywhere else, but it was time to move on. Our next stop was the world heritage town of Luang Prabang in northern Laos.