Amazing Angkor Day #1

The Bayon

Apsara dancers of Angkor

Beautiful Angkor carvings.

"Fromager" tree.

Wow. Angkor Archeological Park is heaven for ruin junkies like Amy and me. We have been here for three days now and have seen many, many ruins. The best ones, in my opinion, are the ones left like they found them. Roofs falling in, trees growing in the ruins with their huge roots going in and out of the stones. We have been to several of these and in the early morning and late afternoon they are simply magical. Indiana Jones never had it so good.

The first day we started with Ta Prohm. This is a ruin, pretty much left like they found it a couple of hundred years ago. The best thing is these huge trees with these giant roots crawling down the walls. The French archeologists thought the roots resembled runny Brie cheese, so they called the trees Fromager.

Even though we were here quite early in the morning, soon the tour groups arrived. This is the major problem here at Angkor. Too many loud tour groups. For some reason, people in these groups seem to need to speak extra loudly to each other, even though the person they are speaking to is five inches from them. So you have to look for out of the way places in the ruins where the tour groups never go, which isn't hard, as tour groups in general never, ever go off the beaten path. You hear many, many languages here from all the people and I would say about 80 percent of the tourists are from Asia and about 20% from Europe or America. About 95% of the tour groups are Asian, mostly Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

We visited a couple of other temples, including Bantei Kdei, another ruin with the jungle going through it. Amazing. The carvings on the walls here are incredible. Dancing girls, called Apsaras, hindu goddesses and more. In fact, these carvings are all over ALL of the temples. There are thousands of them everywhere.

After three temples we were ready for lunch, so we had our touk-touk driver, Johann, drop us off near the Old Market in Siem Reap. This is a great indoor market that has not only food and dry goods for the locals, but great souvenier stands. One row of stalls is all fresh fish and you can smell this several rows away. I bought a lovely little silver beetlenut holder carved in the shape of an elephant. Amy bought some great silk pillow cases and blouses. Silk is a big deal here.

In the afternoon we visited the Bayon, one of the most famous of the ruins here. The Bayon has 50 towers, all covered with four faces in each of the cardinal direction, 200 faces in all. The faces are probably the king at the time, Jayavarman VII. This is one of the MUST SEE places in Angkor. We were there fairly late in the day, when the light is just right to see these amazing faces. We were even lucky enought to see a couple of orange robes monks walking through the ruins. Talk about a picture made in heaven!