I've never seen the movie, "Tomb Raiders", but it was filmed at the Ta Prohm temple (at least part of it) here at Angkor. In this temple are the 'Fromager' trees, with the great roots snaking their way down the temple walls, in and out of temple windows and threading their way through the stones. It is actually these tree roots that cause the temples to tumble down into piles of rocks.
For our last full day here we went out to the Ta Prohm for sunrise. The first time we were here, we came around 8am and the hordes started arriving soon after. We knew that we would be practically alone in the wee hours. We weren't disappointed. We had the temple practically to ourselves.
It's so nice just to sit on a stone, overlooking some amazing jungle/temple scene and listen to the jungle wake up. The suprising thing this morning was that we heard what we could swear was a flock of parrots flying from tree to tree. I thought that parrots were only in the western hemisphere, but here they were and the guard confirmed that they were indeed parrots. They were having a great time and were very loud.
Outside the temple we had another nice breakfast in one of the little stands. Amy had pancakes with lemon sugar and I had stir fried chicken and rice. We washed it down with coffee with condensed milk. We had a nice conversation with some of the little postcard sellers as we ate. Amy brought some postcards of San Francisco, which we handed out to the kids. They looked at the Golden Gate Bridge with wonder.
From here we again went to the Bayon temple, which is in the middle of the huge Angkor Thom temple (which is 4 square kilometers!!!). This is the three level temple with 54 towers with four faces on each tower of Jayavarman VII, who built this temple. Unfortunately, we got there a little late in the morning and many loads of tourists were coming off of their buses. We saw how they all went...they were unloaded at the east gate of the temple, herded around the southeast corner, where there are some nice bas reliefs, herded up to the top, where the towers are, and then sent down to ground level on the north side, and onto their buses again. EVERY tour group did this and it was only the folks who were on their own, or with a private guide, that took a different course.
So I can't say this enough...DO NOT TAKE A TOUR HERE, COME ON YOUR OWN. Okay, enough said about that.
Right across the street from the Bayon is a little Buddhist temple and we were lucky enough to see it when there was a little ceremony going on. There were 6 musicians playing some Cambodian music and a monk or two doing whatever monks do. The music was very magical, especially with the Bayon as a backdrop. But then we saw something really unusual. Six elephants were marching down the road with some Japanese tourists atop. This is how tourists got around back in 'the day', but today you don't see all that many elephants.
So tonight is our last night and we are just hanging out in Siem Reap. Maybe we''ll have some Khmer food for our last meal here, which is quite tasty. Tomorrow it's a 26 hour flight home. I'm very happy to go back, although this has been a great trip. I'll be uploading our own photos to the blog next week (the photos here are just some I found on the web). More soon and thanks for reading our blog.
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