Angkor What?

It is Sunday night here and our group recently got back from a weekend trip to the town of Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia, and more importantly to visit the Angkor temples.

We had 16 interns going on this trip, so we ended up chartering a "bus", which turned out to be a large van. The trip was pretty cramped but we at least had A/C and a good driver who took us around everywhere we needed to go. We made the approximately 5 1/2 hour drive on Friday to Siem Reap, which is basically a tourist town feeding into the Angkor temples. We found a really nice guesthouse for only $7/night (we are getting spoiled really quickly by these cheap prices) and then explored Siem Reap. One highlight: we ate at a great Khmer restaurant called the Dead Fish Tower which featured live entertainment by a Cambodian duo who knew a ton of Western songs. After some prodding from my fellow interns, I was invited up to the mic to sing "Summer of '69." It was a pretty fun night, and I will try to post some pictures soon.

Saturday morning we woke up really early to head to the Angkor temples for the full day. Angkor was the capital of the Khmer empire from about 800 A.D. to 1432. Many of the temples were created by the founder of the Khmer empire, Jayavarman II. They include likely the most famous one, Angkor Wat, which is the world's largest religious building, and Ta Prohm, a temple famous for having appeared in the Tomb Raider movie with Angelina Jolie, a fact we were unfortunately reminded of quite often by postcard sellers and tour group leaders.

It is really hard to describe the Angkor temples. There are quite a few of them, spanning a vast area in the forest. It would take 4 or 5 days to see all the temples, so we were only able to make it to 4 temples, but they were the more famous ones. It was fascinating to see all of the temples, however, and realize that you are walking on ruins that were built well over a thousand years ago. All of the temples have incredibly detailed and intricate carvings and etchings in the stone. One of them, the Bayon temple, has amazing carvings of faces on almost every pillar. It will be easier to see what I mean when I put up the pictures.

Seeing all of this stuff was great, but unfortunately we picked an extremely hot day to visit Angkor. We were all sweating from the moment we left our guesthouse, and there was no respite from the heat until finally a rainstorm hit at about 3 PM. As well, a couple of the temples, especially the Tomb Raider temple, were absolutely flooded with tour groups. This was really annoying because the groups would be taking pictures of everything in sight and generally clog up the temple. However, there were a couple temples we got to where there were virtually no other tourists around. When we had a chance to sit and take in the temple in peace and quiet, we could begin to appreciate how amazing these places were and are.

I'm not sure anything else I could say would do this trip justice, so I will post some pictures soon of our trip. We went out again last night in Siem Reap, although we were also overrun by other tourists in the bars and restaurants there. We had a very long drive back today to Phnom Penh, all of us exhausted but finding it difficult to sleep in the cramped van. All in all, however, we had a great trip and some of us are already starting to plan our next excursion!