146 Angkor Wat 13.12.18
Alex and I left Seyha‘s home at 5:30 to be in Angkor Wat by sunrise.
We were there nearly on time but had to wait in a line for 20min to get on top of the temple.
You can say, well if you have seen one part of one temple you “have” seen all of them or you can go to each and every temple (we didn’t) and see so many variations and again impressing things (we did).
You will see:
many many tourists,
traces of tourists
guards checking tickets or monitoring the area, many (potential and active) tour guides for many different languages, I heard some well speaking guides for German. You will see many tuktuks and drivers who offer you tours. And people trying to sell books, cards, cloths, fruits drinks and food to prices like in touristic areas in Europe.
For me, this was a bit like a cultural shock after my first 1,5 days, because I could see how tourism and the chance to make money changes the people.
Some appeared to be as nice as the others, but in the end, you could see it was about money.
Ah, I forgot: you will see a lot of stones, mostly dark stones. Lying around, piled systematically by someone, or walls, collapsed in heaps.
And stones forming temples. Symmetrical temples, mostly large and in different conservation status.
So can see more temples than you are able to visit in one day. And If you want to see all the details of just ONE temple, it would be more than a day…
Some of them have steep stairs with high steps, some are flat.
In many temples, you will see that there is still a tradition of worship
Many are surrounded by water,
some by forest,
at least one of them is on a hill.
Some are presented more obviously, than you see more Tuktuks, people, souvenirs, some are like hidden treasures, and it is not (only) because they are less beautiful or in worse condition or smaller, sometimes it could just be that they are off the mainroad or that a bigger, more beautiful or better conserved is nearby.
you will see temples fighting against the occupation by trees
And you will see the endless efforts of conservation and stabilization
I wonder how many people buy the 3-days-pass but don’t go there for all those 3 days.
Alex and I had enough after 10 hours and after deciding to go, we only made two stops on the way out and for sure passed some other temples without going there.
I also took pictures of charts to read them later (will I?) and tried to read many there.
So far, I still didn’t know why the temples survived the Pol Pot regime. Seyha explained that they didn’t destroy things, even not in the cities and that e.g. machinery from that time now is used in Vietnam.
We then had some talk that soon lead to his belief. He is preacher in the 7-days-adventists community and really lives his belief. He shares what he has (including his home with warmshowers guests), without worrying about tomorrow, because he feels protected and he had some experiences that proved that to him.
