Cambodia 08 - 15 Feb

So stinking cute!!! See the rest of the impromptu photo shoot below!

Been waiting for this place, Angkor Wat, for a long time. I wasn't sure what to expect from Cambodia but it definitely wasn't this - it's new and modern and glitzy and is doing a wonderful job of remembering its past...in all forms. As usual, the writing is at the bottom. There are separate sections for the pics so be sure to check out the Angkor Wat and Tomb Raider sections below, if nothing else. Lots of beautiful temples and a cool experience with a bunch of curious school children that I was unable to choose the best pics on, so I posted them all! ALSO, make sure to see the section on the Khmer Rouge sites - it was sad and tragic but needs to be remembered.

Siem Reap - home to Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat

Banteay Kdei Temple

Ta Prohm Temple (The Tomb Raider Temple)

Bayon Temple (The Temple of the Buddha's)

Preah Kan Temple

Neak Poan Temple

Phnom Penh Khmer Rouge Genocide Memorials

Phnom Penh

Siem Reap (Angkor Wat)

We’ve been lucky this past year to see some of the coolest temples and ancient sites in the world. We still have a lot more on the list, but Angkor Wat has been up there with the Egyptian Pyramids on my list for a long time. As we flew into Siem Reap, the city that lies next to Angkor Wat and the many other nearby temples, we were surprised with the ultra-modern, brand new international airport and how nice it was. This is another of the Chinese governments' partnership programs and was finished within the last year or so. It’s really sleek although for some reason they built it about an hour outside of Siem Reap by car or three hours by tuk-tuk, past miles and miles of rice paddies and fruit groves. But the roads were also newly built so the drive was pretty nice.

The city of Siem Reap surprised us. We expected India and got Phuket. The streets leading in were lined with shops and little local restaurants with sun shelters everywhere that had hammocks swinging and tuk-tuk’s and motorcycles parked outside. Our hotel, similar to much of the rest of the city, was very modern and pretty newly built. The biggest surprise was the middle of the city, which looked like a Thai or Miami party zone. I’m not sure if it was more Chinese money but someone has dropped a lot of cash building up the tourist zones to accommodate the burgeoning hordes. The restaurants we tried were bright and hip and sleek, with decent food and tons of techno blaring down the street. Overall it felt clean and safe and built to make westerners feel comfortable. If we went again, we’d opt for a little closer stay to the city center, versus a 10 minute drive out, but really, the reason you come to Siem Reap is for Angkor Wat. Unfortunately, after traipsing around temples in the heat each day we didn't have a ton of energy to do a lot of exploring past the restaurant scene.

Angkor Wat is just one of a group of many ancient Buddhist temples that border the city. It is not only famous for the beauty but for the size…by itself it is one of the largest religious complexes in the world. The temples were largely forgotten through time, with no earthquakes and no major wars to destroy them, so a lot of the structures aren’t as degraded as many others around the world. Much of the degradation has been due, famously, to trees…and some looting. Due to the remote location, temples and artifacts are still hidden in the surrounding jungles…down a jungle path you might still stumble upon a half sunken statue or hidden temple.

An engineering masterpiece, Angkor Wat is massive and surrounded by a huge moat, basically a km by km rectangular lake that was dug by hand. I thought that the moat was for safety purposes, like medieval castles, but it was actually a building technique in ancient Khmer times that kept the interior structural floors and foundations from eroding and sinking. Apparently the pressure from the exterior water moat keeps the interior base from sinking. Note - I haven’t researched this but it was what our guide explained, and it seemed plausible. Nevertheless, thinking of hand digging these lakes and moats in the 11th century is mind-boggling, especially when you see how big they are. Another interesting feature on the temple properties is the linear precision. The lines are almost perfectly straight from end to end and positioned in line with the compass points almost perfectly. The ancient engineers had to wait until the equinoxes every 6 months to plumb their lines, starting on a center point and then extending the line as the sun moved later in the day. Imagine waiting all year for March 20th when the sun is at its highest (the equinoxes are different here than in the US) and then getting a cloudy day…ooops!

Wandering through the temples is the highlight and you’re allowed free rein to climb and explore over many of the areas. We had a guide for the first day and then hired a driver to take us around to some different temples on our own for the second day. You can easily spend three days and still not see all of the temples in the area, especially if it’s hot. We were here in February so the temps were manageable but still hot enough to have us sweating by mid-morning. But it is easy to have temple-fatigue if you try to pack too much in.

In addition to Angkor Wat, other nearby temples have become similarly famous. One of the temples, colloquially called “The Tomb Raider” temple, because it was used as a set in the Angelina Jolie movie, is recognizable due to the distinctive trees that have overgrown the walls and roofs and look melted around the structures, like a Dali or Dr. Seuss painting. These huge trees start as a tiny sapling in a crack between the rocks and then grow and melt around the surrounding structures, so it looks like they’ve been poured on top of the temple. Another temple has multiple towers that originally had faces of the Buddha pointing in each direction. Many of the faces still exist, so it’s an interesting photo goal to get as many clear faces in one picture as possible. Some of the faces have been taken with time or erosion but it’s pretty cool to see how many still look out over the horizon with their little Mona Lisa grins.

_________________________________________________________________________

It’s 6:00 on a Saturday night in Phnom Penh and the crane and the construction workers on the 40 story new high-rise next to our hotel are still working. They’ll be working until dark time. It looks like this city is in a crazy boom…construction and cranes everywhere you look. Again, here is a lot of Chinese money flowing into the development of the cities. There is a stunning brand new airport here, also, in addition to fancy high rise hotels and apartments and factories being built everywhere. I can’t recall seeing this amount of building anywhere along our travels - somebody is expecting big things for this country…or leveraging themselves to the hilt on a bet.

Phnom Penh also surprised us - alot. Skyscrapers everywhere, great hotels and rooftop bars with American singers performing, fancy cars, nice restaurants, swanky glittery karaoke clubs and lots of neon lights. It appears that this city has recovered from the horrors of the 70's and its young population is on the rise. From a tourist perspactive, two days can easily be enough but those two days will definitely tax you, especially after you've made the required visits to the genocide sites. It appears that a lot of major industry is also taking note as a lot of production is moving here, such as shoes and clothes for big brands.

_________________________________________________________________________

Warning - graphic content below (my journal entry, so it's a little out of place and emotional/raw):

In the past year we’ve been to some of the world’s great treasures and we’ve been to some of the world’s great horrors. This week we went to both. Cambodia, home to Angkor Wat, is possibly the greatest complex of ancient Temples in the world outside of Egypt. You might know it better as the Tomb Raider temple with Angelina Jolie…an expansive collection of 9th to 15th century Buddhist Temples built into the Cambodian jungles. Truly a world wonder that is deserving of its Unesco standing.

The horror is much more recent and jarring. Aside from the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields might be our world’s saddest period. And sadly, it’s what I think will stay with me most about Cambodia. Not Angkor Wat. Not the beautiful people with their prayer pressed hands and sweet smiles. Not the booming economy with cranes and Rolls Royce’s and electric cars everywhere. But the sight of the Tuol Sleng torture prison and the Killing Fields and the Death Tree. The death pits, where millions were lined up and hatcheted and bludgeoned to death and then dumped into a pit without remorse or ceremony. From 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, in search of a crazy Communist utopian society proceeded to imprison, starve and murder almost 3 million of its’ own people…nearly a quarter of the population. They started by taking all of the educated people, in order to eliminate the free thinkers. Anyone with eye glasses was thought to be both educated and materialistic, so they were some of the first to be eliminated. The Death Tree was the hardest to comprehend - it was used to kill children. They actually swung babies and children by their feet into the tree to kill them so they wouldn't waste bullets.

How evil can people be that they swing babies and children by the feet into a tree to kill them? At what point do people stop listening to “charismatic” leaders and end up killing their neighbors and not to what’s right or ethical or humane. This happens, again and again, when people are used by crazy men or as pawns by idiot governments, mine included in particular, and then have to follow the “Least Shitty Option”. I say mine because it was the American bombing in Cambodia that, in part, led to the Khmer Rouge movement. We walked through the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Torture Facility over two days and I constantly tried to hide the tears. But then I noticed everyone else doing the same. In one of the death pits a bone was slowly emerging from the dirt. In others there were bits of cloth coming out that were originally used to blindfold those about to be murdered. Each month, as new items surface the workers clean them and add them to the Stupa honoring the dead, which is already filled with thousands of skulls and bones.

And the next worst part was listening to the audio files of the guards that committed the crimes - they were told to do it by their leaders and if they didn't, they weren’t true ‘believers of the cause’. They would be traitors if they didn’t kill ALL of the family members of whoever was randomly chosen as an enemy of the revolution. How can someone follow another so blindly that they can’t question killing a child…or killing anyone for that matter? Pol Pot picked the poor and the uneducated and those easily led by patriotic anthems and simple sayings like “if you want to kill the weed you need to kill the roots also” which meant that you needed to kill the children so nobody would return to exact revenge. This led the Khmer Rouge to kill one in every four Cambodians. Doctors. Lawyers. Farmers. Women. Children. Everyone. A quarter of the population of an entire nation...gone in five years. There were rooms in the prison that were full of nothing but the pictures of those that the Khmer Rouge documented, tortured and then murdered. They all stuck with us but a couple more than others. #408 was a sweet girl, couldn't have been more than 10, and #1, a young boy with the chains still around his neck. These were the people that they killed...innocent kids, because no one was willing to stand up and defend them. This is the saddest and sickest place I've ever been.

I wish everyone could come visit this place. Or the Holocaust Museum in Berlin. Or Robben Island Prison in Cape Town. Or Belfast and Derry, Northern Ireland. Or countless others. I wish that these idiots weren’t always so quick to blame others for all of the ails of the world. Or that they professed themselves to be the savior of the world. But mostly, I guess I simply wish that people were more educated to not have to believe these evil people versus what their hearts or minds, if they had any, would tell them is right.

It was an emotional two days and a lot of silence was needed to process it. It’s sad and sick and you need to come to Cambodia to see the immense beauty but you also need to see this tragic shit so it doesn’t happen again.