Strap in. This is gonna take awhile. After two days and --- (pause to count and while I try to relocate my map, without which this latter task will be impossible) --- eleven temples, there's a lot to recount. I'm not going to go temple by temple -- check out the pictures on Facebook for each -- but talk about the adventure, the experience, and all the fun Things Of Note.
While at a certain point you have seen so many temples that your eyes are crossing, it is not true that once you've seen one temple you've seen them all. And while sometimes it is tempting -- read, on the last temples when you are dying from the heat and exhaustion -- to be like, yeah so it's a bunch of old rocks, you never quite get there, because they are all so impressive in their own ways.
They are, however, a bunch of old rocks. A bunch of really really old rocks. I was talked into buying a guide book -- hey, it'll make a good present when I go home -- and the most recent dates are eight hundred years ago, some into the 9th century.
A note on the book: I bought it to shut up the vendors offering it and give a really good excuse why I didn't want to pay some random friendly guy to tell me about the temple history, however interesting it was. The guy I bought it from was very nice, but scalped me for 12 bucks -- though in all fairness in the bookshop it's 28 -- and my tuktuk driver later informed me Cambodians get for 6, and I'm pretty sure I heard other vendors later offering it for that. So whoops, my bad. I wasn't pleased to discover this, but like I said, it'll make a good souvenir.
And the vendors, by the way, are everywhere. They of course congregate at the entrances and exits and gather by each temple. They are loud, persistent, and "if you buy you buy from me." They range from very young -- I saw a girl not much more than three, heartbreakingly, waving a postcard in the direction of a guy -- to middle age. Many very young, and many teenager/young adult.
One of them, particularly persistent and friendly -- she was admiring my white skin, and discussing how the rich Cambodians make their skin white, but all she could do was wear long sleeves and a hat -- finally convinced me to buy a scarf. It was only because she sold one to my tuktuk driver for 2000 riel and then asked 1 dollar for me, but apparently they're friends. Either way, at least she was honest enough to laugh about it, and I picked out a beautiful blue cotton scarf.
They are all friendly, of course, but annoying, though I learned if you talk to them in Khmer they leave pretty quick, if you say 'I'm sorry' and whatever word is appropriate for their age -- it all mean "sister" or "brother", but varies according to age. For the little kids, who hang around for ages by the hapless tourists with frustrated looks on their faces, I noticed if I just say, "Sum tow own," (sorry, younger sister/brother), they headed off quick enough.
I am also really getting tired of being called "Lady." I greatly prefer "sister", and actually really like it whenever anyone calls me that.
While I'm on the subject of the vendors, it should be noted that it's a particularly sad story -- my tuktuk driver explained that of all the money that people pay just to get into the park (20 for one day, 40 for three days, maybe 60 for the full week), exactly none of it goes to the Cambodian people who really need it, and instead just fatten the pockets of the foreign companies that run the park. For the vendors, they must pay three dollars a day just to be there.
If you'll excuse a bit of a diversion from the temples -- it is incredibly sad to see so many young children selling and not going to school. But unlike in the cities, out there it is the countryside, and I got a chance to see a lot of it. It is remote, and there are no schools anywhere close. They certainly can't afford to have a driver, even tuktuk or moto, and the kids will probably make more money selling. It's a vicious cycle.
And about the remoteness -- no, seriously. The roads are paved, ish, for the tourists, but they are still filled with potholes and issues, and in between the temples, there is just jungle, and people living. It was not unusual to see children playing in the rivers and streams, swimming around, shrieking and laughing as children do. The water has been god knows where, but they don't mind.
The temples are enormous, but the jungle hides them, such that you can't see them until you're literally standing in front of them -- except for Angkor Wat, which was built to be seen as far as I can tell. The plants and the green is everywhere, insidious and beautiful. The trees are if not as old as the temples, in the range of two or three hundred years, and are ridiculously tall and have the craziest roots. They drape themselves like lounging gods, in the most improbable ways. I never knew trees were able to grow like that.
The ruins, however, are everywhere. I'm sure just going to see the main temples you see the merest fraction of what's out there. Home to the Khmer Empire during the Angkorian and pre-Angkorian eras, and filled with Kings, whose names all end in -man for whatever reason, who liked moving the courts and the capitals around, each move -- with each new King -- bringing more building. You can see them sometimes, tucked into the jungle -- these days, maybe someone's house, or where the children play.
So here is the picture you start with: tourists, from everywhere, the jungle, and a whole bunch of really impressive old rocks, the brain-children of some really powerful dudes a really really long time ago, and masses of Cambodians with every kind of useless trinket imaginable, swarming the tuktuks as they arrive like carriages to the ball.
Got it?
Okay, now we can start exploring...
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