Day 22 - Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom

For our last day of touring in Cambodia, we saved the best for last including sunrise at Angkor Wat, and the second largest complex Angkor Thom.   

T and I were to rendezvous with our guide at 5:20 am, so we could make the drive and arrive early for a good seat to catch the sun rise. As I put on my touring togs, I was reminded of a great line in the second book of Little Dorrit. Dickens is at his best, pillorying a certain type represented by the young Tip Dorrit. Tip along with his family has recently come in to an inordinate amount of money after spending twenty-some-odd years in debtors prison.  Now being wealthy, the Dorrits make up for lost time by taking a European.  The book opens with them in the Alps, and with Tip at his most haughty, condescending to converse with a fellow traveller by the fire. And Dickens roasts him indeed, describing Tip thus: "He was dressed in the very fullest and completest travelling trim. The world seemed hardly large enough to yield him the amount of travel proportionate to his equipment." Oh Charles, oh Chuck.  How funny you are!

But it got me to thinking about travel attire.  There are many factors to consider: 1) the damn heat, 2) the damn mosquitoes and 3) the damn steep stairs and tiny treads that the Angkoreans sadistically employed to connect galleries (i.e. floors).  Apparently the harder they are to climb, the more analogous they are to difficulty of attaining heaven.  For me, this means I should dress as a cross between Indiana Jones and high school version of myself.  Khaki pants, t-shirts, and Patagonia tied around my waist.  Top it off with my hair stuffed under my husbands explorer hat (Sorry Rye and Jen, I have a bad habit of making good use of T's gifts).  And my tennis shoes.  After an hour or two in the late afternoon heat, the outfit coalesces into what I consider to be a proper sweaty mess.

T has the additional consideration of also acting as our dromedary.  You name it, he's toting it - my cold medicine, Off wipes, sunscreen, maps, passports, wallets, blackberries, receipts, the hotel card, sunglasses case.  Luckily enough, he got an appropriately named "Ex-Officio" Traveller's vest from his valentine, bought at the only Orvis inside of 5 Burroughs.  Don that bad boy over a Nike workout shirt recently acquired on the cheap.  Pull on some linen pants--the subject of a breakdown in Barney's when purchased (I think it had to do with the pants having an exposed drawstring?).  A voila.  A second proper, even sweater mess!

We had the morning by the reflecting pond at Angkor Wat waiting for the sun to rise, to cultivate a better understanding other's interpretation of travelling trim.  There are some who chose the nylon route, or the high-healed/mini-skirted route as chronicled in T's Post-Postscript yesterday.  But there are also those who have -- how should I say -- decided to go "native."  This usually includes a combination of a) Angkor and/or Singha Beer Tee b) purple swami pants, with the inseams meeting somewhere be the knee and ankle, c) flip-flops, and d) pointy rice patty hat, bought at the nearest tourist trap.  Typically, this is accompanied by a beard if a man, and a headscarf if a woman.  Never mind that this version of a hot sweaty mess has almost nothing to do with the actual native togs of the countrymen from which they were purchased.  Do borrow a bit from Dickens, there would hardly seem to be a backpack big enough to accommodate the stereotypes from which this equipage was drawn.

Oh good fun.  

But the view was splendid, the temples were interesting and our guide was marching us along as intent as ever.  Angkor Wat itself was large, with the whole of the first gallery being carved sandstone with various Hindu epic scenes, images of Vishnu, of the Naga, of Garuda, etc.  It was said that 7,000 slaves labored for the 40 or so years it took to build this complex.  That the amount of Sandstone quarried from 55 km away was equivalent to the amount of material used to build the great pyramid.  That if the same complex were to be built today, one team of engineers estimated that it would take 300 years.  And that the Khmer Rouge had hid in the complex during the civil war.  Despite being atheist, they didn't destroy the religious images, but rather used its galleries and halls as hideouts.  Americans dropped a bomb nearby the temple, which caused one of it's south towers to fall.

Angkor Thom, and specifically the Bayon temple within it was my favorite

 of the 10 or so we saw over the course of our 3 days.  It was the first place I really felt like I understood the term "Mountain Temple" used to describe this style, with is representative of the Hindu belief about the mountain at the center of an ocean representing heaven.  The temple had massive stone faces at the top of its many towers, successively on higher galleries towards the center.  Climbing up the galleries, you could walk between narrow alleys, looking up at the faces above you and the blue sky above them.