Wow, Angkor Wat is just the biggest and main temple in the Angkor temple park 20-minutes north of Siem Reap, Cambodia. Around this area there are around 50 temples, and they are all very significant in their own way, in their shear size, and the planning that went into building them. Not only that, many of the larger temples have water around them. Large moats, or reservoirs, of water which are so well built it’s quite unbelievable that they were created so long ago. The moats however weren’t simply to make the temples look good; they were used as in a canal system to feed each other and to irrigate lands during the dry seasons. The map below shows some of the moats and reservoirs built, but it doesn’t show all the temples, or the total size of the Angkor temple park.
Angkor Wat in the morning sunrise is a good crown puller, but there were other places to see the sun go down. (Read further down.) It would probably take a book to describe Angkor Wat, let alone all the other temples, and of course there was one offered for sale by the many vendors trying to sell their wares or food. (The book was a dollar (US), but we declined.) Every time you pull up to visit a temple the vendors are around you like bees around the honey pot. If you walk away they always shout “Remember my shop when you come back, it’s shop number nine”, or whatever their shop number is.
There are three options to enter the temple park, 1-, 3-, or 7- day passes. We opted for the 7-day pass, but in hindsight 3-days would have been sufficient. Not all temples are the same, in fact they are very individual, but after seeing more than half a dozen the draw of seeing another ones loses its appeal. We also managed to see a lot as I had rented a scooter to get us around and therefore we weren’t stuck on the schedule of a tour bus, and we decided which temples we would go to, and in which order.
Ta Prohm temple is where some of Tomb Raider was filmed, and has many trees which have grown into various temple walls over hundreds of years. They are a sight to be seen, and it’s incredible how they have shaped themselves into the walls. Some of Tomb Raider was also filmed at Angkor Wat, but we think there was a fair bit of CGI used also as the temple is not in as good a shape as in the movie.
The last thing we found amazing was almost every wall, both inside and outside, is carved with figures or decoration. Around the inner part of Angkor Wat temple, spanning probably over 100 metres, are various stories, parades, offerings, and the story of the ‘Churning of the Ocean of Milk’. Wikipedia ‘Churning of the Ocean of Milk’ The craftsmanship of these carvings are very detailed, although the last carvings created in Angkor Wat, around 1536, aren’t as good a quality as the carvings of around 1100 (according to the information board). If you look at the pictures below, around the main carving, you will see decoration covering the wall. These decorations covered mostly all of the wall.
