Elad’s blog

No question, the BAYON is the most beutiful temple in Angkor.
From a distance, it looks like a huge ruin, just massive stones on top of each other. Only when you get close to it, you suddenly see that all the stones are sculptured faces, looking on all the directions at each other and at you. This is an amazing, very enigmatic, place. I could - and did - walk there for hours.
Apart from the Bayon, I’ve seen many other temples in the temple-city of Angkor today. There was the Baphon, much less interesting than the Bayon, there was the elephant terrace, a 300-meter terrace all covered with carved wall-relieves of elephants from which the king used to watch parades; there was the small but extremely imaginative Neak Pean (I think), in which large walls form a rectangular pool that was filled with water, and in the middle of the pool there is an artificial island, circular in shape, whose base is formed by two massive stone-carved seven-headed snakes, with a temple on it. (must look great at night with fire torches all around! I can already see the great priest sacrificing something - only that Buddhist are against this nonsense). There was also the East Mebon temple (with sculptures of elephants and lions), and a few more I just don’t remember their names. Than we climbed a hill (of course, with a small hill-temple on it), and watched Angkor-Watt (don’t mistake: Watt means ‘temple’. Angkor Watt is the biggest temple in the area, and it also gave its name to the entire site, which spreads over 40 or 50 sq. k”m and hosts dozens of temples in the jungle) at sunset. A minute before sunset, when the sun was in an exact position, the towers of Angkor Watt were colored by the orange light of the descending sun, and the Watt seemed to burn in fire - an extremely beautiful sight, which lasted for less than a minute (actually, I almost missed it).

But first things first, and first was last night.

Last night I found myself in a bar called ‘the Angkor What?’ together with Anya, Carolin, Chris and Tom. We had erally good time, drinking Lao beers and Vodka-Coka-colas. Later we started dancing and having really great time. Carolin and Anya both became really drunk (British know to drink, they have bars deep in their culture!) and it was really fun and we all had really good time. We went to sleep really late, and today the girls were both tired and hung-over. I’m afraid they didn’t enjoy today as much as I did, but at least they had great time last night - you can’t have it all!

On the way to the site today I noticed this road site saying : “We don’t need weapons any more!” with a picture of people shooting each other on one side, and children playing on the other side. Good for them they ended up their war and got rid of Paul “the psycho”-Pot. I mentioned something about it to Chris and was really surprised to discover he had no idea about Khmer-Rouge, Paul Pot, Guerilla, Civil War in Cambodia, or the land being full with mines. I was sure these things are famous!

Tomorrow I’m going back to Bangkok. I’ll probably try to catch a flight, because I need to get there when travel agencies are open to reschedule my Hong-Kong flight of Wednesday in order to stay for the Thay Coronation Ceremony. I could try to do it from here, but I don’t trust Siem Riep for this stuff - it will be better from Bangkok.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 18:17 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.