Angkor Wat

Angkor is an incredibly beautiful city full of stones, temples and places that, as a whole, leave you with a sense of why we don't just build fantastic structures for the sake of building anymore. It does happen from time with brave new architecture but not often enough. Why must places of worship be so uninspiring and underwhelming in their beauty or spirituality ?

The picture above is the innermost levelof Angkor Wat, which also happens to be the highest and is steep and really scary. The steps have a run of only a few inches so it is a hairy climb. Once at the top, climbing down is even more treacherous. It is possible to go down a set of steps that have a hand rail, but we went down a set that did not have one. The anxiety in both the descenders and the onlookers was palpable as we tried to make our way towards the steps to climb down.

While Angkor Wat, the main temple is nice, there are other temples whose beauty is much more haunting.

We decided to take a tuk-tuk the first day, a good decision in retrospect since it allowed us to gain our bearings. The next day, we went to Angkor on electric bikes which was an interesting experience in itself. The good part is that we were able to get away from the heavily touristed areas and from the vendors screaming at you to buy something. It was humourous at first but lost its colour pretty soon when they became really insistent. Ta Keo and Ta Prohm were some of the more exciting temples on the outer rim while Bayon on the inner circuit is fantastic. After two days of walking around in temples and old ruins, we had had our fill. We could have visited further but it would have been after a day's rest. Since we had to head off to Phnomh Penh, we only visited the temples for two days but that should really be a minimum to amount of time to spend there.