This place rocks.
Many, many, many rocks. It’s unbelievably huge. I have a three-day pass to visit the temples here, and after two days I’m just beginning to scratch the surface.
The main area of temples and monuments covers almost 200 square miles, and there are outlying temples about 30–45 minutes away in all directions.
This was the seat of the Khmer empire, which lasted from 802 to 1432. At its height it stretched from Burma to Vietnam, and Angkor, its capitol, had a population of over a million people. This at a time when London was a pokey little town of about 50,000.
The main attractions here, the Angkor Wat, Bayon and Ta Promh were all built during the rule of Jayavarman VII (1181–1219), the Khmer “golden age.” But many of the other “minor” temples are scattered about the jungle here, and I’ve been trying to see as many of them as I can stand.
The heat here is the main hurdle, and if it weren’t for the many vendors selling bottles of water I’d be nothing more than a pile of bleached bones by now.
I’ve hired a motorcycle taxi guy named Lee to whisk me from place to place. We get along very well, and try to get an early start each day, but by mid-afternoon I have to escape back to my hotel and throw my desiccated body into the pool.
I was a little worried at first that I was keeping Lee from more lucrative, go-all-day tourists. But when I mentioned this to him this afternoon he told me that he was quite happy to escape the heat himself.
I’ve whipped out the VISA card and have sprung for excessive luxury. The upside is that my room is tres swanque and the staff fall all over themselves in their desire to attend to my every whim. The downside is that each of my every whims takes a sizeable chunk out of my steadily depleting funds. So I can’t afford to go whimming about willy-nilly.
The hotel is populated with tour groups made up of old, fat, rich people, who so far have not been noticeably eager to enjoy my excellent company. It occurs to me that this may be just as well, as they don’t strike me as excellent company themselves. A lot of them seem to treat the Cambodian staff like bugs. It’s pretty embarrassing to watch them hound the staff about every perceived slight (NO, NO! JESUS!! NO ICE! I SAID NO ICE!!!).
Those of you who have stayed in good hotels in this part of the world know how painfully obsequious the waiters and bartenders tend to be. So I can’t understand how anyone can so belligerently take advantage of that. But there’s lots of stuff I don’t understand.
There’s a large group of Koreans here too. They all seem to be winners of some sort of bellowing contest, or perhaps they’re all deaf, because their conversations can be heard in Thailand.
Fortunately I have my iPod with me and have been able, mostly, to drown them out while recovering by the pool. I crank up the iPod when I’m wandering around the temples to eliminate the inane tourist chatter too. Yesterday Beethoven’s 7th Symphony was the perfect accompaniment to the Grand Temple of Angkor Wat, but this morning a little Debussy was fitting for the tree-shaded Ta Promh. And it may seem strange to some of you, but while watching the sun go down over Angkor last night, the Grateful Dead’s rendition of Franklin’s Tower was just the thing.
I’m still seeking the perfect setting for Tom Waits’s I’m Big In Japan.
The sunrises are supposed to be spectacular here too. But I think I’ll just have to experience that in my next life.
Assuming I don’t come back as a nematode or something.