Do it while you can

I often use the line "do it while you can" to support my reasons for traveling to exotic places where a fair amount of physical exertion is necessary to make the visit worthwhile. Angkor Wat meets that prerequisite. Add to this the fact that the current number of visitors per day is currently unlimited and reaching dangerous volumes. Dangerous to the Temples that is. So much so that UNESCO and the organization that manages the entire Angkor Area will be instituting quotas on daily visits in the near future. That will make it more difficult to come here. So double the reason to do it while you can. 

The Angkor Wat Temple complex exceeded all my expectations. I was expecting to be blown away but it was better than that. I was fucking blown away. The combination of what was created by man from 850 - 1200 combined with the effects of being left to the jungle forces from 1200 - 1880 are so amazing that you have to see it with your own eyes to believe it.  The architecture, the grandeur, the scope, the construction, the beauty of the sites, the magnificence of the details, the legends inscribed in the stone, the destruction by man and the forces of nature. I can only imagine what it must have been like when it was first found in the late 1800's. 

What pisses me off is that until the early 70's the Angkor complex was pretty much as it was found in the 1880 s. Some restoration work had been done by the French while they were here until the mid 50's so it was more accessible. That would have been the time to come here. But it all changed when Nixon decided to carpet bomb Cambodia and when the Khmer Rouge decided to use the Temples as forts for their rebel armies. B52 payloads are not kind to 50 meter high towers made out of sandstone. So many temples were damaged or destroyed during the years 1970-1990 which corresponds to the period of the Cambodian Civil War. Land mines laid by the Khmer Rouge remain to this day. We saw a land mine removal team at work on our way to one of the Temples this morning. 

The Temples were built by Kings. The labour was voluntary. People came to build them out of devotion.    The early Temples were devoted to Hinduism. A later King converted to Buddhism and the symbols in the Temple carvings changed accordingly. Then came a king that went back to Hinduism and had all the Buddah's removed from the earlier Temples. Kind of like cutting you first wife out of the wedding pictures so you could still look at them without getting aggravated. Same thing at the Temples, where there used to be Buddah's there was nothing or they replaced it with a poorly carved Vishnu or Rama. If the walls could talk. 

We worked hard seeing all the Temples we went to. It was hiking boots and socks, lots of sunscreen and mosquito repellant, we were in the jungle. It was alternately dripping hot or raining which provided a cooling effect before and after. We drank gallons of water. Sweated out the same. We climbed a million extremely steep steps - coming down was harder, walked many kilometers, went into pitch dark galleries, crossed rickety catwalks, hiked up to a waterfall to see the carvings on the riverbed, and we only saw 25% of the complex. But we saw the best ones. The ones that blow you away. 

I was trying to think of somewhere else that I've been that compares to Angkor. Rome comes to mind as does Athens but I'm going to say that Angkor surpasses them both. Even if they were combined Angkor still surpasses them. 

The town of Siem Reap is where you live when you come to visit Angkor. It's six km from the complex. A bustling Cambodia city by day it's at night when the neon signs come on over the central area that the city turns into sort of Cambodian version of New Orleans (this analogy was a Benita observation). Tuk drivers are constantly asking if you need a ride, hawkers are constantly calling out "Madame you buy scarf", people are walking around with beers in hand, others are sitting with their feet in fish tanks ($2 for 20 minutes and you get a free beer) having little fish giving them pedicures while they indulge in a free beer. Restaurants compete for tourist business with drink offers, free wifi, trip advisor rating posters, comfy bed or bench seating. Not so much on food quality. My favorite place is the gelato shop we found called Blue Pumpkin where you order your gelato and find a place on the all white beds in the cool lounge and relax with your shoes off sitting in bed eating your gelato. 

The food scene here is all over the map. Italian, French, Japanese, international fusion is all available but the greatest concentration is Khmer food. I would describe it like Thai food but with less flavour. I found  that If I ask for it spicy it tastes better. The best Khmer food we ate wasn't in the city at tourist restaurants but in the country at places where local eat. Also at roadside stands where they sell a snack made from rice, coconut milk, lime juice, sugar and peanuts that comes in a 12 inch bamboo tube that has been lying by the side of an open fire for several hours so that it is burnt on the outside. Inside the rice has been perfectly cooked into a sticky concoction you eat by peeling back the bamboo like a banana and biting off the rice tube that is revealed. It's delicious. Costs 50 cents.

It's Tuesday morning at 7 o'clock and the day begins. After our masagges last night and the worst Khmer food so far we are lying in bed having decided to take the day off from Temple tramping. Instead we are going to go sit in a fish tank and have our feet nibbled while drinking cheap beer watching the tourists go by. Tomorrow we head to Ho Chi Minh City.