Cambodia III - Revenge of the Strangler Fig

This was our final day touring temples.  The pictures are in reverse order so this blog entry begins where we finished at Beng Mealea.  Beng Mealea is what the Cambodian people named this temple after they "discovered" it again.  The original name has been forgotten.  Beng Mealea means the flower of the mahogany tree.  There were a lot of mahogany trees in the area and it seemed to fit.  Evidiently, this temple was one of the hiding places for Pol Pot in the 1990's.  It has been opened up for tourists for the past ten years but there isn't any restoration projects happening at this time.  

As you can see from the pictures, there are a lot of rocks strewn about. This isn't because someone came and tried to rebuild it.  It is the work of an invasive species of tree  called the 'Strangler Fig'.  Evenn though this temple had been clear cut 10 years ago, the strangler fig is taking over and breaking apart the sandstone rocks.  The rocks then fall to the ground in ruins.  I think it looks very picturesque.

The strangler fig in action.

This carving of Hydra has five heads.  They represent the four elements plus one, the sky.  According to our guide, carvings of Hydra will always been in an odd number and represent something, three heads are for the three main Hindu gods, Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma.  Five Hydra heads for earth, wind, fire, earth, and sky.  Seven Hydra heads would represent all the colors of the rainbow.  This carvinng had the most detail out of all of the Hydra carvings we saw during our three day tour.  Believe me, we saw a lot of Hydra carvings.

This was a bee Jeff found in the bathroom.  It was huge.  There have been several big bee hives on the temples.

Our tour started with a trip to Tonle Sap lake to see the floating fishing village.  This is a picture of the houses.  They are built on stilts to make accomodation for the changing water levels.  It is currently, the  dry season.  

Little kids were everywhere in the village.  They kept themselves entertained by captaining their own boats. 

This was a floating school.  It was donated by a Vietnamese company.  

Even though these floating houses were on a river in rural Cambodia, they had battery power and a satilite dish.  Priorities, right?  I also got a back massage, which was a series of hits on my back from the co-captain of the ship, who may have reached the old age of 10.  I kept trying to get Jeff's attention to say,"pay him, so he stops!" but it was too nosiy for him to hear.  Super akward!  It ranks right up there with the massage I had in Hawaii in which an India wedding party walked through.  

More examples of the houses and daily life of the people living here.  This is as far out as they bring these homes, the non-stilted ones.  In the rainy season the 3m lake rises to 12m and they float the whole village towards the stilted village.

This is a picture of the steering device that was used on the boat.  It was a rope connected to the steering wheel and the rudder.  

This was the "dock" that changes positions depending on the level of water in the river.  Right now, it is the dry season, so the water was low.  In the rainy season, the water level is much higher, it covers the slits of the houses.  Everything is built to move with the ebb and flow of the water.  These peoples lives revolve around the water.  Our boat trip was $40 for both of us.  Each set of tourists got their own boat.  At first, I didn't understand why, there was room enough for the other tourists in our boat. Then, our guide told us that the boat captains may only take out one boat a day.  This means that the men working here are getting paid a lot more than their counterparts in the fishing village.  

I've been having an internal debate about responsible tourism on this trip.  Where we being responsible tourists taking a huge boat up a river with three people on it to gawk at these peoples lives? No.  Where we helping these people make a more profitable living? Yes.  In the end, I guess it is about balance.    At any rate, we have concluded the guided tour portion of this trip. The rest of the trip will be at our lesiure.  I have several things I want to do and see still in Siem Reap. Stay tuned.

Day one of Cambodia

We have finally gotten to Cambodia!  More specifically Siem Reap.  Today's tours of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and a number of other temples/temple complexes were lovely.

For Bangkok I left everything for a post-trip picture buffet with a few captions and musings.  This time I brought a bluetooth keyboard and updates will be more numerous and hopefully still a jumbled buffet of pictures.

Also, you can follow Janet at: janjancam on instagram.  She is posting up pictures there as well.  In case you are eager for pictures you can get them instantly from janjancam, then scroll down and check out all my pictures.  Finally, comapre Janet's shots and mine side by side and based on the angles of difference in the images, can you guess how far apart we were standing?

We landed in Siem Reap's international airport last night.  It made our little Redmond, Oregon airport look huge and the Bend airport could match it for size.
Visas took 5 minutes and $21 ($20 if we had brought a passport sized picture, but we saved money by not bringing one)  it felt just like Hanoi (electronics stores, not immigration) as they passed our passports and papers down a long row of officials who had to stop talking on their cellphones long enough to slam a stamp in.  It is literally a 30 foot long curved desk, you hand over your cash and papers then shuffle to the end as they stamp and slide your stuff along the other side of the desk.
While not atrociously overstaffed, they could have sent one of the guys down to customs.  Along with everyone else we tossed our customs forms in a pile and strolled out - while people walked back through.  I had no reason to go through the "red" custom line.... and no option to either.

Hotel picked us up and we were wisked off to our 4 star hotel.  This is apprently one of the busiest times in Siem Reap as the Vietnamese and Chinese tourists pour in over Tet/Chinese New Year (New year here is in April, like Thailand).  Chinese and Vietnamese are also the two largest groups of tourists according to today's guide, Americans rank 6th-ish.  The point being, everyone had gotten their hotel rooms before us so we ended up going up in price rather than down from what we were looking for.  I'm glad that we went up in stars rather than down, but the Angkor Paradise needs to up their water pressure.

$$$ Don't change your dollars into Riels.  Everything here is handled in USD.  I haven't seen a lot of currency but our tour guid said it took about 2 cm of bills to buy a kilo of rice.  I guess they don't make bills with more than 5 zeros.

Today we went off with KongKee, our guide, a driver and Siem Reap tours.  Everything we went to was well laid out and easy to walk though.  We  didn't NEED (Everything is set up very very well) a guide at all, but it was nice to learn more about where we were.  We are glad we had the guide today and for the next two days.

Since blogger is now  blogspot and Google owns it all, it is super easy for pictures from my phone to auto-upload and be available to drop in here.  In the past they were in reverse order so I sometimes re-order them.  These are all out of order, chronologically, but I'll add some mind-blowing captions with gallons of aditional insight and useful information.

Janet and Khong outside Angkor Wat.  This is one of the high seasons and nothing was crowded.  Busy, but not crowded

Down the steps at one of the temples built in the 900s.

Garudas holding up the Kings platform.  Elephans adorn the rest of the face  for a few hundred meters.  The king would stand up here with the other fancy folks and give speechs, Angkor Thom.

The seven headed naga/serpent.  These are everywhere.  This is at the head of the moat bridge to Angkor Wat.

In the 50s the French took apart this temple, catalogued it all and set out to restore it.... 70% done, with 300,000 pieces of stone on the ground, the Khmer Rouge burnt the plans and now the puzzle pieces are left like legos on the floor of a 5 year old's bedroom, never to be put back.

Angkor Thom is my favorite, 4 Buddha faces on each pillar.

This is the temple where Tomb Raider was filmed and now that is how it is refered to.  The trees here are amazing.  The trees plus the faces of Thom were my mental images of Cambodia before I got here.

Man made moat around Angkor Wat, most of these have moats that were also used to irrigate the fields for more than one rice crop per year.

Piles of rock are set up in all the temples, as shown here, the friendly tourists keep these mini pyramids intact.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Thom was a Buddhist temple which showed daily life rather than scenes from the Ramayana or beginning of the world which adorn all the Hindu temples both here and Thailand and Indonesia.

One of the four pools at Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat was breifly used as a Buddhist monistary.  They built this one in the 1600s, about 300 meters away.  It is blocked by the tourist market.  So you get three of the major religions in one spot (Wat was built as a Hindu temple).

Those Elephants from the Kings speech promenade.

The demons who lost the tug of war are forever pulling on a naga.

Looking out over Wat and the Jungle from the top of Angkor Wat.

Tree that is growing from on top of the sandstone building.

Thom.

This temple was built with brick in the 900s, sandstone had to be brought 50km from the quarry.  The carve-ability of the sandstone made it the choice for building for everything else.

I wanted Angkor Thom to be much more creepy and mysterious.  It is just really cool and on a sunny day, nothing is too scary.

If you zoom in, that is Janet headed up to her favorite spot, one of the many libraries at Angkor Wat.

The windows at Wat still had a few of these 'candle stick curtains' left.

No one talks about the unfortunate serpent that had to be coiled around the island and pulled on by the demons and gods to raise the world.  That could not have been comfortable.

Angkor Thom: daily life carving.  I love reflexive stuff like this stone carver carving a scene that was carved by .... well you get it.

     

Amok Fish, served in a coconut, this is the national dish - well Amok is.  With shreded spinich like greens and a lot of lemon grass, it isn't bad, but now taste-bud-blowing.

All those tourists are in trouble.  That is the kings walk way, it is about 1.3 meters wide and quite impressive.

Oh, the possibilities!

A fair bit of rude people left their marks around Wat.

Tomorrow, 8:30 we set out again.  What wonders will I take multiple photographs of?  Tune in to see!
Jeff