I remember when Jen and I were mentioning to people that we were going to Paris on our Europe trip, and that we had a day booked for the Louvre, I swear to god every single person we talked to that had also been to the Louvre had the exact same thing to say:
"Oh my God, the Mona Lisa is so disappointing."
And a little bit of me is kind of grateful to these people, because I went into seeing the Mona Lisa with subterranean expectations. I was expecting a postage stamp sized painting, completely obscured by bullet proof glass and so many people you'd never get close enough to ever see her.
So when we we were face to face, as it were, the size seemed normal, and there really weren't TOO many people waiting to get a photo and even though it was behind impenetrable glass, it was still a really cool experience to see it in real life.
I think I was expecting Angkor to be a bit like what people told me the Mona Lisa was going to be like: disappointing.
Like, maybe the pictures didn't do it justice, the buildings were smaller, or the trees weren't as tall, or there weren't so many places to see or something.
Could not have been more wrong.
Angkor means "city" or "capital", and Wat means "temple" and it was built around 1150 AD for King Suryavarman II of the Khmer Empire as his state temple and eventually his mausoleum. It was left abandoned for 150 years being "rediscovered" (*cough* by white folk *cough*) in the 16th century.
This was the number one place I wanted to visit when we started planning our trip, out of all the things on our list of places we wanted to go, this was at the very top of mine.
While we had to get up incredibly early, and there were lots of people around outside the front of the structure for the sunrise itself, there was something so incredible about seeing the spires emerge from the darkness bigger than we even imagined.
Angkor Wat
The moat around Angkor Wat
We didn't speak much, all of us sort of taking it all in, and we didn't really know where we were going, we kind of just started following people we saw as they moved deeper into the temple.
We fully expected that wandering around would follow the same structure as maybe the pyramids. You can look, but you can not touch. This was not the case.
People were everywhere, there was almost nowhere you weren't allowed to be on. It felt really taboo, but at the same time you're sort of following people's lead a bit, and everyone was all over the place. I think this is likely to change as the restoration projects continue, but it felt SO strange to explore things in the way that we did.
There were areas that had explicit instructions where you weren't allowed to enter, climb, walk etc. We absolutely followed those instructions, but the rest of the time were kind of just going with it.
This appeared to be someone's favourite lunch spot. There were shells all over the ground beneath us.
We spent about 20 minutes sitting here and watching the sun get higher in the sky. Ashnola and I were absolutely dying from the heat, I don't know if you can tell from the pictures...
At one point we were talking about taking off our socks and tying them together as a makeshift sweatband to keep the sweat from rolling into our eyes. We were told that of all the places we were going, the place with the highest risk of malaria was Angkor, but we also heard that malaria medication can make you have crazy dreams and you're not supposed to drink alcohol etc so we opted not to take that. I decided that instead, to fend off the mosquitos, I would just wear long sleeves and pants. This may or may not have affected the sweating situation...I also may have rolled up my pants, taken off my long sleeves, and changed to sandals before the day was done, mosquitoes be damned.
I don't know if it was the heat, or our lack of sleep, or our general excitement about being here, but something came over us after a while, and we started taking a large number of absurd photos of us being so unserious among the ruins.
Like, I think we're adorable here, but I know others might think: these are adult human women in an ancient temple...is this the way?
I don't think we did anything disrespectful, (apart from maybe all the climbing???) it was just goofy enthusiasm for the most part so I'm just going to close my eyes and proceed as if I'm certain that is acceptable.
We drove from temple to temple on the Tuk Tuks and it was so cool to be driving on these overgrown roads and have an elephant just walk beside you, or an ancient bridge full of tiger carvings appear of out the greenery to carry you over yet another moat to yet another incredible temple.
Bayon Temple in Angkor Thom
We spent a lot of time at Bayon, fascinated by the faces that were everywhere you turned. We were constantly marvelling that we were in a place like this, that it's so well preserved and so grand.
The only thing that prevented us from going fully into Indiana Jones mode was that there were quite a lot of people. Not overwhelmingly so, but just enough to most of the time, keep you centred in the reality of the date and times we live in.
There were a few moments however, where one second there would be hundreds of people milling around, lots of voices and noises...and then all of a sudden they'd all move on, and for a while there'd only be you.
I had a moment like that standing on top of one of the temples in Angkor Thom. I was staring out at the grounds below and about 20 people were milling around and then suddenly...nothing. My three companions had already descended the tall stairway to the bottom of the temple and were heading to the Tuk Tuks to move on to the next structure, and I was still on top looking down at completely empty and quiet jungle and ruins.
Am I Indiana Jones?
It was in these sudden, quiet moments that the unbelievability of what you're doing comes through the strongest. That "where am I?" incredulous question rattles through your brain and there is no tourist family in matching shorts trundling through your field of view to remind you of the answer. You are an explorer seeing this for the first time; you imagine what it might have been like to live here; you wonder at your own incredible privilege, that your Canadian small-town eyeballs are allowed to be here seeing it all.
And then the moment is over and you move through the world again forgetting the magnitude of everything that's happening around you.
I had a few of these quiet moments as we climbed through each of the temples; time would slow and I'd have this brief moment of feeling like the only person alive, and then SNAP, I'd hear Ashnola's laugh, or the click of a camera and suddenly it would be over.
I will cling to these moments forever, they were so amazing and profound, and made me feel small and insignificant, but also grateful and so, so lucky.
The whole complex of ruins is so vast I don't know how else you'd be able to get around to see everything. without a Tuk Tuk. Our stamina started to run out at the end of the day as it just kept getting hotter and hotter. There was no breeze this far in the jungle, it was just still, muggy, HOT air and it was really starting to get to us.
We knew that the last place we absolutely had to see was the Ta Prohm temple.
This is maybe one of the most famous places in all of Angkor, because fig trees have taken over the ruins.
They grow over everything, molding in and around the structures wherever they can. They're a bit like the cats of trees: if I fits I sits.
These trees were everywhere and it was so hard to understand how they were so tall, without their roots being in the GROUND to hold them up. They were wrapped around blocks of stone for the most part and yet stood a hundred feet high!
There is one tree in Ta Prohm, however, that makes all the others seem paltry in comparison.
I think I'd seen a picture of this on about a million weird internet lists - Top 10 Incredible Places you Have to See to Believe! This was one of them.
Ashnola and I pushing through the sweat to appreciate this glorious tree.
It was a bit sad because you could see that people had taken chunks out of the roots of the tree, and someone even carved their initials into it. It made me really think about all of our gymnastics during the day and hope that we didn't cause any damage to anything.
All in all, I think I can safely say that this was one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my entire life. I don't think anywhere has ever exceeded my expectations more than Angkor and I hope that whatever preservation efforts are being made to keep these structures standing remain well funded and going strong.
I did a bit of googling while writing this, just wanting to make sure I was getting some of my facts straight, and I came across an interesting fact about the Bayon Temple that I thought rounded out this post nicely.
The 200 remaining, serene, smiling faces in the temple are said to potentially represent King Javavarman VII but his face is also known by another name...
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