Siem Reap 2012: Angkor Thom

When in Siem Reap, you go see the temples. And that’s what we did.

We woke up bright and early at 6.45am in the morning to get an early start on our first morning there, ready for our temple adventure. Waking up at 6+am in the morning wasn’t as scary as it sounds because Singapore is, conveniently, 1 hour ahead of Cambodia. SInce my body is used to being woken up by the kids between 7-7.30am Singapore time (6-6.30am Cambodian time) everyday anyway, the early start was a snap.

Annoyingly, I continued to wake up by 6.30am every single morning I was in Cambodia. Ugh. Clearly my body didn’t realise it was on vacation.

We started our day at Angkor Thom. This is a fortified city built by Angkor’s greatest king, Jayavarman VII. The site is huge, said to be 10 sq km in size, and in centred on Bayon, an interesting structure with 54 gothic towers, decorated with enormous faces of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. The city has five immense gates, each over 20m high. There is one each in the northern, western and southern walls, and two in the eastern wall. We passed by the south gate as it is on the main road from Angkor Wat and were fascinated by the giant statues that stand in front of the gates. In a motif taken from Hindu mythology of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, there are 54 gods on the left and 54 demons on the right of the causeway. 

These are the gods…

And this is one in a row of demons.

You can see the huge gate in the background of the second pic. It’s only wide enough for one car even though there’s traffic coming from both directions, so there’s quite a bit of jostling and reversing going on! The gates are decorated with stone elephant trunks and crowned by four gargantuan faces of Avalokiteshvara, facing the cardinal directions.

This is the back of the gate, at a point in time when there were no cars going through. You can see the heads and the detailing quite clearly here.

Past the gate, we were soon at Bayon.

“Unique, even among its cherised contemporaries, Bayon epitomises the creative genius and inflated ego of Cambodia’s legendary king, Jayavarman VII. It is a place of stooped corridors, precipitous stairs and, best of all, a collection of 54 gothic towers decorated with 216 coldly smiling enormous faces of Avalokiteshvara that bear more than a passing resemblance to the great king himself.These huge heads glare down from every angle, exuding power and control with a hint of humanity – this was precisely the blend required to hold sway over such a vast empire, ensuring the disparate and far-flung population yielded to his magnanimous will. As you walk around, a dozen or more of the heads are visible at any one time – full-face or in profile, almost level with your eyes or staring down from on high.”

~ Lonely Planet Cambodia   

Lonely planet described this as “looking like a pile of glorified rubble from a distance” but I thought it looked better than that!

Walking the narrow corridors.

Some of the bas-reliefs, amazing in their detail. 

DD does an Aspara (Hevenly Nymph) – not so successfully.

The all seeing heads. You can get a good view of them when you climb to the third level, which was what we did.

From Bayon, we made our way over to Baphuon. Noted to have been one of the “most spectacular of Angkor’s temples in its heyday”, it said to be a pyramidal representation of the mythical Mt Meru.

Baphuon, from a distance. It is a long way in.

You have to cross a 200m long elevated walkway (made of sandstone) before you can the to the main structure.

Decided not to climb up. The stairs up looked very steep!

Taking a well deserved break.

After all that walking, we decided to give the Royal Enclosure a miss. We lingered over the Terrace of Elephants for a bit before we whizzed back to town for lunch. Angkor Wat up next.