Day 16 -- Ta Prohm and more Siem Reap
After yesterday’s pre-dawn excursion, our 6:45 pickup time seemed downright decadent. We headed back out the road to the temple area, this time awake enough to pay a little more attention to our surroundings. Traffic in Siem Reap was different than either Vietnam or Laos. Scooters remained the overwhelming majority of vehicles, but small trucks and lots of tour buses were more noticable (mostly vans like ours, but full sized buses as well). The most alarming driving habit was the Cambodian method of making a left turn -- cars or scooters would move into the oncoming lane well in advance of making their turn, driving directly into traffic on a very gentle diagonal with death defying casualness.
The traffic along the route between the town and the temples was fast moving, but scores of small stands lined the road anyway -- and by “lined the road” I mean “set up rickety-looking stands displaying used liquor bottles full of grey-market gasoline 18 inches from the road.” Also art, fruit, fried snacks, hats, beer, incense, T-shirts, scooter tires, bottled water, highly suspect guide books and little plastic models of Angkor Wat. But don’t worry, if you didn’t feel like risking death-by-sideswipe by stopping, you’d find plenty of kids hawking all of these items except the gas just outside the gates to the temple complex.
We arrived at the entrance to Ta Prohm a few minutes before the 7:30 opening time and so were able to observe the petty tyranny of the security guard. Maybe a dozen and a half people were waiting to get in, blocked by nothing more than a single sawhorse set in the middle of the wide path, and a lone guard who barked at anyone who either obliviously or intentionally tried to walk past. At exactly 7:30, he moved the sawhorse about 2 feet to the right and on we went.
Ta Prohm is famous for having been featured in Tomb Raider, a big, loud and dumb movie based on a video game and starring Angelina Jolie. I’d like to think it would be famous anyway because it’s crazy cool, but the truth is, if you’re casting the role of super-creepy jungle lair of a horrifying demon or Bond super villain, you’d look long and hard for a better option than Ta Prohm.
Built in the 12th and 13th centuries as a more public temple -- thousands of people lived and worked there -- Ta Prohm hasn’t weathered as well as the other temples. Samart posited the theory that because it was built for regular people rather than royalty, the work was done more quickly and cheaply than its counterparts. And it’s true that the carvings are less visible and the bricks more tumbledown. But you don’t go to Ta Prohm for the carvings, you go for the trees.
I found a fantastic description on Wikipedia from a scholar named Maurice Glaize and it’s too perfect not to share: "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." The trees are eating this temple and it’s spectacular.
In the van on the way back for breakfast, we discussed how to spend our free afternoon. Samart mentioned the Angkor National Museum, the old market, other temples we could visit, the fact that our pass would let us go back to Bayon if we wanted to explore that a little more. Suddenly he piped up “Oh! And we have killing fields!” with humorously inappropriate enthusiasm.
We made it back to the hotel in time to grab breakfast (they served until a very civilized 10:30 a.m.) and then organized a pair of tuk-tuks to the Angkor National Museum. As much affection as we all felt for Samart, neither his English nor his knowledge had been quite up to the task of answering all our questions about the history, religious and culture significance of these mind-blowing archeological sites. We were hoping to get a better grip on all three at the museum.
Two hours, two floors, one film, hundreds of objects, and thousands of words of explanatory text later and I’m not sure I ended up any more enlightened. But it was a fantastic museum. It’s hard to believe how much fine detail was carved into sandstone and survived ten centuries. You can see the patterns on the fabric of the dancers’ skirts, the individual beads in their ankle bracelets. The exhibits include elaborate Hindu figures with multiple arms and animal heads, tranquil Buddhas in every material and every iconic pose, and a scale model of Angkor Wat that really brought home the level of human effort required to build it.
The stories behind the figures and scenes in the carvings are insane. I realize that’s wildly culturally insensitive, but seriously. In one tale, a god called Indra gets swatted off the world by a giant eagle and lands on a tree branch covered with pygmy elephants (sure, that happens). In another, a spirit gives birth to an elephant-headed baby after drinking a god’s bathwater. And remember that snake-tug-of-war-in-an-ocean-of-milk story? I didn’t even mention that one of the effects of the churning was to cause a mountain to sink into the milk until Vishnu took the form of a turtle rescued it. See what I mean?
Add to that the fact that every image has three or four possible interpretations, and that some religious figures seem to flow from Hindu to Buddhist and back again depending on who’s in charge at the time. I won’t even attempt to get into the nuances of Theraveda versus Mahayana Buddhism (largely because I still don’t know what they are). But these strange myths and belief systems inspired the most astonishing, unforgettable places I’ve ever seen and so I will appreciate them, even in my confusion.
Mary headed back to appreciate more Khmer culture in the form of a massage and Dave, Glenn, Holly and I walked back into town for a peek at Pub Street and the old market. We wandered down tiny pedestrianized shopping streets admiring the arts, crafts, creative libations, and flesh eating fish pedicures (yes, that is a thing). We spent an entertaining half hour in the old marketing in search of snazzy chopsticks (which we found, along with a pirated Supreme T-shirt for Jack). And then it was time for a swim and a shower before dinner.
Samart and the local travel agency had organized a complimentary dinner for us at Chanrey Tree -- a gorgeous restaurant a few minutes’ walk from our hotel -- as a way of making up for Holly sleeping on a sofa for three days. I felt very OK about Holly sleeping on a sofa for three days as a result.
After dinner we attempted to find a bar called Laundry in Pub Street, but failed. Nevertheless, we enjoyed a bit of wandering among the cheerful crowds of drinkers, fish pedicure recipients, hawkers and gawkers. We spotted a couple of vendors selling big ol’ fried spiders on sticks, but were convinced most people were simply having their pictures taken holding them rather than actually ingesting the horrible fuckers. Feeling a bit footsore, we opted to tuk-tuk back to the hotel for a more peaceful drink before bed.
