Angkor Thom Temple

Siem Reap, Cambodia - December 26, 2011

The Angkorean Empire lasted from the 9th to the 15th century.

The empire was ruled by a series of god-kings who commissioned a number of fantastic phallic-shaped temples.

The kings had extensive canals dug, which held water during the dry seasons. This water and the fish and water of the nearby Tonlé Sap (the "Great Lake") helped to proved three rice crops a year and sufficient resources to support all the construction.

The area was abandoned to the jungle because of attacks and incursions by the nearby Thai people.

The French naturalist Mahout rediscovered the area in 1860 and the French colonized Cambodia from 1863 to 1954..

You buy a three-day pass for $40 to visit all the temples you can handle. The pass has your picture and is checked at each site you visit.

The U.S. dollar is widely used within Cambodia. We're packing to fly to Hanoi today. We'll have one full day there before flying back to the real world

Tomb Raiders

Siem Reap, Cambodia

We begin the day with the Ta Prohm Temple. This is where Angelina Jolie filmed "Tomb Raiders" when she played Laura Croft.

After discovering all these lost temples in the jungle, they decided to leave just this one with some of the trees intact as a sop to popular taste.

Lately, however, they are clearing away more of the vegetation and working hard to restore the temple to a closer approximation of its original appearance.

The trees of this temple have tempted many writers to wretched excess. For example, this quote from Maurice Glaize (a scholar of the Angkor period culture).

On every side, in fantastic over-scale, the trunks of the silk-cotton trees soar skywards under a shadowy green canopy, their long spreading skirts trailing the ground and their endless roots coiling more like reptiles than plants

There are so many wooden steps and tourists wandering about the temple that most photos I take need to be heavily cropped to eliminate the modern anachronisms.



Mr. and Mrs. Phred mug for the camera.

This is only one of the fantastic construction projects  of Jayavarman VII . The temple was called Rajavihara ("royal temple"), today known as Ta Prohm ("ancestor Brahma"). It is also called the Jungle Temple. The foundation was laid in 1186 A.D. and the site was abandoned after the fall of the Khmer Empire for nearly 400 years.

The second temple we saw today was the more delicate pink sandstone temple called "Banteay Srei".

We must have seen 50 beautiful temples in the last month.

From now on we will refer to any more temples as ABT (Another Beautiful Temple).

They're shipping us out to Hanoi in the morning....

Cambodian Dancing Queen

Siem Reap, Cambodia

I really had to work to get this videa posted. First I had to download it from someone elses Iphone. Then I had to load a Kodak program to play it on my PC. I tried uploading it directly to blogger, but they don't like MOV files. So I opened a You Tube account, uploaded it there and then embedded the You Tube videa in this blog....blah...

The best way to view this is to click where it says "You tube" and go directly to you tube for a bigger image.

We wake up on the boat in Kampong Cham and wait for the bus to take us to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat.



It's a five hour bus ride though Cambodia. On the way we stop to look at a rubber tree plantation.

The hotel in Siem Reap is nicely landscaped.

It's Christmas Eve and our 45th anniversary tonight.

Asians like to decorate for Christmas, even if they are mostly Buddhist or Muslim.

The weather is hot and steamy. I'm glad it's winter. This is high season for tourists.

We have dinner on the patio the first night. It is a buffet. The food is really bad. Everything is full of bones. Even the chicken is full of shattered bone as if it has been chopped with a machete. I'd put that down to local custom except the hotel manager is very urbane from Sicily. He's got a contract to provide the meal and is trying to make a profit on non-return customers. We get that in Florida a .lot.'

Local children sing Christmas carols and local artists do traditional dances to entertain the hotel guests..