Elad’s blog

A thousand years ago, around the time the middle ages in Europe were at their peak, the Khmerian kingdom of Angkor reached its peak, too.
It was a military kingdom. From the deep jungles of Cambodia, the Angkorians went to conquere Loas, Cambodia, and Siam. Their king declared himself a god-king, and allowed himself to leave at a stone house (opposite to the ruling Cambodian belief, that stone houses are made for gods and demons, and normal people should have disposable houses - a belief that made Cambodia a living hell for archaeologists). To mark one of his victories, the king built a town called in the so politically-uncorrent name, “Defeated Thailand”. As it turned in his language, “Siem-Riep“.

Nowadays, the Thay people can only lough at this historical remark. Siam Reap is behind Thailand in so many ways, it’s unbelievable they once ruled that land. Cambodians don’t even believe at their own currency - they try to charge everything at u.s.dollars, and only later they move to the local Rial.

The “Dead Fish Inn” me and Chris were staying turned out to be a nice and quite exotic place. It resembles very much Kushi Rimon’s place at the 101, only that instead of a tiger they hold here a pool of crocodiles. It turned out that Chris, Anya, Carolin and myself, after meeting yesterday at the bus, hun g around all day long. We hired together a taxi to Angkor, and had a very nice time together.

We visited three palaces.
The Angkor Watt itself, which has remarkably steep stairs (actually, a tourist who came just after us have fallen down and opened his head - they had him evacuated to a hospital). The Angkor watt holds wall reliefs describing scenes from the Mahabarata(the final battle) and from the Ramanaya (the battle between the monkeys and the dragons) ; since from all of us I was the only one who read these Indian epocs, I became sort of a guide to that part.
The Ta Prohm, where Tomb-Raider movie was shot, is the temple where you see the jungle eating the buildings - with magnificent trees covering the ruins and enormous roots going through walls.Chris got very enthusiastic about this and kept looking for photo opportunities.
We also visited smaller temples, but at 16:30 it started raining so we didn’t finish the day with the elephant terrace as we planned.
They bless here everything. On the way back to our taxi Chris and I noticed a monk blessing a Fanta can. Since we could both use a blessed Fanta at the time, we bought ourselves one (not blessed, just Fanta).

Angkor Watt is just like I expected-huge, beautiful, very commercialized, and lets you see how at the end, the jungle wins.

Tomorrow I plan on another day at Angkor, and then we’ll see about Tuesday - options are either more Angkor, or back to Bangkok, or go to Pnohm-Penn. Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s fun!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 8th, 2005 at 14:39 and is filed under Travels, Cambodia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.