Angkor What?

After my time in Phnom Penh I woke up early and caught the speed boat up to Siem Reap. The boat was indeed very fast, and you would actually sit up top on the roof with the wind in your hair and the sun on your face, watching the jungle whip on by. The scenery was pristine and beautiful, with the first half of the journey being on the Tonle Sap River and then the second being across Tonle Sap Lake.

Tonle Sap Lake is a natural wonder of the world, and really is quite amazing as there is no other lake in the world like it. Tonle Sap drains into the Mekong, but for about half the year, during the wet season, when the Mekong River floods, the Tonle Sap River actually flows in reverse, and causes the lake to expand. During the dry season the lake is about 2,000 sq. km., but when the flow reverses the lake grows to an enormous 13,000 sq. km! Wow! Thousands of square kilometers of forest around the lake become flooded, and provide ideal homes for spawning fish. It really is quite a unique biosphere in to itself, and a beautiful place to take a boat ride. Being the wet season, the lake is so wide that when sailing across it you can't even see the shore!

Six hours later we cruised up to Siem Reap, and I took a tuk-tuk into town with two other travellers who also happened to be from Vancouver. I checked into Smiley's Guesthouse and relaxed that afternoon. Siem Reap is at the doorstep to Angkor - the world's greatest collection of monuments, and I was thrilled that I was mere hours away from seeing it with my own eyes. I had planned to buy a three-day pass to check out Angkor, and I found out that that included a free sunset the night before, so I decided to take up this offer and check out the temples tonight.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Angkor, prepare to be enlightene, amazed, and mystified. Angkor is the site of the former capital of the Khmer Empire, which at one time ruled a large chunk of Southeast Asia. The empire ruled from around the 6th to the 11th Centuries, and today's Cambodians are the modern-day descendants of this once-powerful kingdom. Former kings, over a long time span of several centuries, constructed enormous, elaborate temples dedicated to the gods, and built massive cities around them that even included advanced drainage and irrigation works to support the population of millions. Angkor Thom is the largest of these ancient cities, and during its height over a million people lived within it, whereas London at this time was home to a mere 50,000 people. Well all empires rise and fall, and in time so too did the Khmer. Angkor was eventually abandoned, and left to the all-powerful jungle to be consumed. 'Lost' to the world for several centuries, Europeans first discovered the temples in the early 20th Century, although there are historical reports of Indian and Chinese traders coming across Angkor long before this date.

Either way, the great temples of Angkor have since been excavated and some of them partially restored, and what you find at the site is simply mind-blowing. The temples are beautiful beyond imagination. They're absolutely enormous, and although there's well over thirty temples scattered throughout Angkor Archaeological Park, each of them is unique in their special way. Some of them have humoungous central pyramids that you can scale up for a dizzying view of the temple complex and sprawling jungle, some have incredibly detailed sculptures and carvings in their rock facades and bas reliefs, and others have towers and wings that sprawl out - and up - for great distances. It's simply indescribable. You will never see anything more incredible in your life. Not even the Egyptian Pyramids, Machu Picchu, or China's Great Wall can compare in sheer scale or beauty. They're just unfuckingbelievable!

My three days spent exploring Angkor are three of the best days of my life. I enjoyed visiting all of the temples, regardless of their particular size or level of grandeur, but I definitely had three favourites - Angkor Wat, the Bayon, and Ta Prohm.

Angkor Wat is the largest and most famous of all the temples, and it's the one that draws in the biggest crowds. It's absolutely massive, and was designed to be an accurate representation of how the Khmers viewed the universe. It has five towers and a gigantic central pyramid, and I visited Angkor Wat several times, both at sunrise and at sunset. The rock changes colour with the rising or falling of the sun, and so visiting this temple at different times of the day presents a kaleidoscope of shades and hues just waiting to be photographed.

The Bayon is part of Angkor Thom, which was a whole entire city at one point. The Bayon is quite large too, but is famous for its monumental stone faces carved into its rock towers. These giant faces stare out at yor with piercing eyes and enigmatic smiles, and regardless of where you're standing inside the Bayon, there's always at least four or five or sometimes up to twenty that are within view. Or rather, you are within view of them. It's like they're alive and watching your every single move with suspicion. Altogether there's 214 of these all-seeing, all-knowing faces in the Bayon, and their creepy surveillance also makes for some pretty amazing photographic opportunities.

Out of all the temples at Angkor, Ta Prohm is my favourite. Unlike all the other temples, which have been cleared of their many-century old jungle debris, Ta Prohm has been left almost exactly as it was when it was first discovered. Ta Prohm is literally being eaten by the tropical jungle, and is strangled with gigantic trees and roots. Botanical tentacles wrap around entire buildings and walls, and in many places have caused parts of the temple to collapse. Wandering around Ta Prohm you truly feel like you've discovered a Lost City in the jungle, and if it wasn't for other visitors you'd swear that you were the first person ever to set foot upon its grounds since being abandoned. I spent a lot of time here, and felt very 'Indiana Jonesey' while clambering up and down over the toppled towers, broken bricks, and ruinous roots. Completely enchanting and amazing. I loved it!

Three days was plenty of time for me to see almost all that I wanted to at Angkor. There's far too many temples to see in one visit, and since I definitely plan on visiting this place several times more in my lifetime, I didn't feel bad at all about leaving some of them behind. I managed to get in two sunrises and two sunsets while here, and left the grounds every single day feeling completely awe-inspired. The outside world is just now waking up to the amazing achievement in architecture that is Angkor, and you really should visit before mass tourism turns Angkor into a virtual Cambodian Disneyland. Their beauty, grace, elegance, intricacy, design, and sheer scale truly are unparalleled on our planet.