Hot Wats

The long and steamy bus ride from Laos to Cambodia was a good introduction to the heat and sweat that comes along with everyday here... it is HOT! I spent a few days getting to know Phnom Penh which is a city that seems to combine my Asian city experiences: it has the winding back alleys and poverty of Kathmandu, the posh(er) riverside and city center - not to Bangkok scale but reminiscent, and the quiet suburbs similar to Vientiane. I spent a morning at Tuol Sleng, the high school turned prison/torture center of the Khmer Rougue. I saw the small cells where the prisoners were shackled and the mechanisms of torture. There was also a video and some displays discussing the history, chain of events, key players and survivor accounts; these provided a great background and a stepping stone for understanding a small part of what Cambodia has gone through in the past four decades. I got chatting with two girls from Boston and we shared a tuk tuk to the Killing Fields a few kilometers out of town. After a tough day, we splurged on pizza (western style with cheese... amazing) on the riverside and then fruit shakes on the lakeside - a nice water-side evening.This past weekend I took a bus out to Siem Reap - a sleepy, riverside town. On the bus, I met two Swedish girls and we shared a tuk tuk to a guesthouse and then another to the temples the following day. They were very nice besides constantly speaking Swedish when they were both fluent in English.
Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples were incredible! We stumbled through the gates and the towering entryway in the predawn darkeness while thinking of all the people who had walked in and out of the temple in the past centuries - very spooky and atmospheric. The sun rose over the temples not as magnificently as we had hoped but it was beautiful to see them gradually light up. We escaped the early morning tours and went to the smaller (this is relative, it was huge) temple complex of Ta Prohm. The temples here were being left to nature which had let to some structure collapse and several huge trees growing over and around walls. This was by far my favorite temple - I'm not sure if it was the morning light, lack of tourists, or drama of ancient architecture and nature but it was fantastic.
The next temple will be remembered for it's amazingly steep steps. They were probably three or four inches deep and eighteen inches high. This was not too bad going up, although we were all holding onto the steps in front of us. Going down, if you were six inches back from the first step, you couldn't even see the stairs, it looked like a cliff. I am not afraid of heights and I had a hard time of it so I comend the girl I was with for doing it despite her fear (although it took her a half hour to get down).
The complex of Wat Thom, the second most touristed, was next on our list. We walked around the Elephant Terraces and a few temples before arriving at the crowning jewel of the complex - Bayon. The temple itself wasn't huge but the intracitely carved towers of faces surrounding the top of the temple were amazing. There were probably 100 large faces with eyes everywhere you turned (somebody's watching you...).
We saved our Angkor Wat visit for the heat of the day when all the tourists would be back in town. The complex was incredible but unfortunately the towers were under construction so we weren't able to explore the upper levels. The most memorable part of Angkor Wat wasn't actually the architecture (although it was pretty spectacular) but the intracitely carved stone murals covering the lenght of the four perimeter walls. There were scenes of heaven and hell, war, and gods and godesses. To think that this ancient empire not only transproted the stone, cut it into pieces, and assembled the temple without modern tools but also took the time to produce artwork on such a mass scale is mindblowing. I would definitely love to find time to spend a few more days exploring the periphery temples because I am sure that there are some amazing and frequently overlooked complexes that would be worth a visit (if only it weren't so hot). The three of us returned to town for Cambodian food and ice cream - a happy end to an absolutely amazing day.