Angkor Wat is amazing

I had said in an earlier blog post that Beth and I had a bit of temple fatigue, but we definitely don't have temple ruins fatigue. The temples of Angkor Wat and other nearby complexes are simply amazing.  They were all built in the 11th-14th centuries, and most were lost and taken over by the jungle for a few centuries. Angkor Wat itself was never abandoned and has been continuously used as a temple since the 1100s.  It was built as a Hindu temple but became a Buddhist temple in the 1600s.  This was true of many of the temples as Buddhism gradually became the dominant religion in this area instead of Hinduism.

The Ta Prohm temple still has many of the trees covering it since restoration of the temples is slow and expensive.  Personally, it's my favorite so far (and I think many other visitors too) because it's so picturesque.  I hope they keep some of the trees and roots as they restore it, though I understand the jungle isn't necessarily great for the stones.

The photos below with the faces are from the Bayon temple. It originally had 40+ towers with faces on all 4 sides, but now only 26 remain.  The faces are thinking, or meditating, or happy to be reincarnated (I think that's what our guide told us the smiling faces were).

This place is a photographer's dream.  I hope the pics below do the temples a bit of justice, as they are gorgeous and inspiring.  The detail of the carvings that have survived give an idea of how majestic they must have been in their heyday. Just imagine how much time building these temples, moving the sandstone by bamboo raft and elephant, and then carving into every wall must have taken.  Angkor Wat, for example, took 40 years to build, and it was never completed.  Construction ended when the king who had commissioned it died in battle.

(In case you're wondering, the reason Beth and I are both in long dresses is the fairly strict dress code to get into certain areas of the temples: skirts or pants below the knee, no bare shoulders (we both had light sweaters with us). Etc. Most of the temples in Thailand also had this same dress code, though for active temples we'd also have to take off our shoes before entering)