Cambodia’s Ankgor Wat Offers Beauty & Mystery
One of the truly special places in the world is Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Siem Reap, which is located near many ruins of the Khmer Empire, has developed into a major destination with modern hotels, Asian and French cuisine, and a reputation for welcoming visitors. Although the country and its people were devastated by the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s, things have slowly improved for citizens and tourists.
Khmer Empire Created
The Khmer Empire controlled a large portion of Southeast Asia from 800 to 1450 A.D. and built numerous cities and majestic stone temples with beautiful carvings. The capital city of Angkor was built near a huge inland lake known as the Tonle Sap. Its builders relied on an elaborate series of waterways to provide irrigation, water, and transportation for an estimated 500,000 residents.
A visit to the famous temple of Angkor Wat provides one of the most dramatic and exciting experiences for travelers. It is a 200-acre complex surrounded on all four sides by reservoirs called borays. The site only can be reached by walking across a large causeway with snakelike figures called Nagas on each side. At the center of the square complex is a stone temple with five tall spires that symbolizes the Hindu universe.
Architectural Splendor
All four of the temple’s corridors and some of the temple’s chambers contain engraved murals telling elaborate stories. The walls of one long corridor depict a story of the world’s creation by various deities. Another corridor shows a judgment day where good people are rewarded in paradise and the wicked are sent down into a special hell where demons administer gruesome tortures. A third corridor displays a military procession by the army of King Suryavarmin who built Angkor Wat in 1150.
The architectural complexity and grandeur of Angkor Wat was never equaled. But there are still plenty of sites to see which are full of beauty and mystery. In subsequent years, other rulers including Jayavarman VII built other beautiful temples in the area around Angkor including an entire city nearby known as Angkor Thom. All these later structures were dedicated to Buddha rather than to Hindu gods. Angkor Thom features 37 towers, and each tower contains four huge stone faces of a smiling Buddha looking out in each direction, as well as hundreds of carvings of dancing female spirits known as apsaras.
A third set of two temple complexes worth visiting close to Angkor Wat are known as Ta Prohm and Preah Khan. Both were built by King Jayavarman VII in the early 1200s and dedicated to his mother and father, respectively. Preah Khan served as a Buddhist monastery and university for several hundred years. Stone pillars discovered there state that thousands of priests, teachers, servants, and workers were required to run the temple.
Ta Prohm is only semi-intact, but it became quite popular when it was used as the setting for the movie “Tomb Raider” and for several other Asian films. At Ta Prohm, there are dark chambers to peak into along with some huge silk cotton trees growing right through the buildings. In places, the weight of these stonelike trees and their vine like trunks have cracked open the roofs and walls.
As you walk through both of these sites, or along the wide causeways leading to them, it is ironic to see that some of the original Buddhist shrines and carvings have been either destroyed by nature or smashed during a brief revival of Hinduism that took place under a later ruler of Angkor.
How to See It
At a special place like Angkor Wat, it is important to design your trip to enhance your experience. One way is to avoid taking a large group tour of the sites since the groups tend to visit the same principal locations at the same times each day. Hiring an experienced guide who can take you to the key sites, work on your timetable, answer your questions and avoid the crowds is an affordable and smart alternative in Cambodia. Pin Vannak of Angkor Special Tours is a friendly and knowledgeable guide, who accompanied us for four days and brought us to the places we wanted to see early in the morning and after the heat of the day. It is important to proceed at our own pace and savor the experience. While the views will make you want to take a picture every minute, try to sit in the shade from time to time and allow yourself to think about the talented artisans that built these temples and the world in which they lived.
