Siem Reap

After a day and a half in the capital, we moved along to Siem Reap. But not before we had a great time at the Russian Market, the Central Market and Wat Phnom. The Russian Market was just like any good souq in any major middle-eastern city. You could get brackets there, freshly killed fish and chicken, fruits and vegetables of any and every kind, water pumps, clothes, shoes, fake rolexes, you name it, they had it. In the middle of the place you could also eat, and it was hot and steamy and wood-smokey. And the sounds of the people hawking their wares, trying to get the attention of every passersby was constant rising and falling with the passage of potential customers.

Then after a long day of bus-riding (six hours), we skirted the Tonle Sap on the way north to Siem Reap, near to the complexes of what are generally known as Angkor Wat. However, Angkor Wat is really just a tiny (but beautiful) piece of the many temple and ceremonial and royal complexes here for the Khmer Empire of old. Nearly six hundred years worth of construction made this place an amateur archaeologist's (like I sometimes have fancied myself in the past) dream.

Cyndi and Bruce and I make a good team as a sort of common hive mind with somewhat different ways of looking at things but always sharing everything: food, water, money, battery chargers for our gadgets, etc. The tourists are really on the dollar economy - the local currency is really only used sparingly, at least from what we can tell. And of course, since everything costs a dollar or so, and since banks and ATMs only provide twenties, this is a challenge. Nobody ever has change for a twenty, so we must hash together random change from here and there, one person pays for the dinner, hoards a couple of bucks from the change, another buys entrance fees to historical sites, hoards a couple of bucks from the change, and we make do from there, pooling our resources.

While we saw many impressive monuments today, which we will see again in coming days (they are all huge and need to be revisited in different light for pictures and with different knowledge acquired from our research and with more or less people at different times of the day), including Angkor Wat and Bayon, the most wonderful for us was Preah Khan. It means "Sacred Sword" - the previously invading Chams were supposedly defeated here and the Cham King was killed on this site - a temple complex sprang up around 1191 on the site. The Chams had been subservient to the Khmer Empire for centuries, but they rose up and tossed off their overlordship and came and sacked the capital. The Khmer then fought back and reasserted their authority with brutality, and of course there are bas-reliefs depicting this victory all over the place in all of these ruins, replete with Hindu imagery, gods, apsaras, nagas, you name it. Here the jungle has come back to overwhelm the place a bit, some of the rocks have fallen, trees are roughing up the exterior, there were hardly any people there (it was midday, and the ruins are not high on the list for the daytrippers). And there are these amazing bugs that we couldn't see in the trees creating almost a rock-concert decible level of sound, almost piercingly painful but incredibly wondrous and potent in a nature-power kind of way. Some of the jungle here does not impose so much on the ruins, but here it did and truly let us know that nature is part of this whole complex much more than elsewhere.

Below one of the pools at Preah Khan:

Tomorrow, we're going to explore more of the outliers and see what the day brings, starting with re-freshing our visit to Bayon where some of the best bas-reliefs are. One ruin is apparently situated near a spectacular waterfall.