Four smiling beautiful faces

August 20, 2008
12:11am ICT
Angkor
near Siem Reap, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

How many World Heritage Sites have you visited today?

Because for me it’s one. Angkor is the general name given to the hundreds (literally) of Buddhist and Hindu temples scattered around Cambodia, all built between the 10th and 15th centuries by the Khmer empire. This was the height of Cambodian culture, and the temples remain the dominant point of pride for Cambodians – it’s in the souvenir shops, it’s on the money, it’s on the flag for God’s sake! Of course, though great in their time, many of the temples were essentially lost for a good 500 years, until being rediscovered by the French when they colonized Cambodia, and though the temples are made of sandstone, some of them are showing their age.

This is the first and last photo with me in it – because shortly after this photo was taken, I became an unphotographable ball of sweat.

The central, most famous temple is Angkor Wat. This is the big one. It’s over 50m tall, and is surrounded by a 4km long moat. To enter is, you walk along a long stone path over the water, then you come to a huge building. However, you quickly realize the building is only 1 room deep, and is, in fact, merely the gateway to another long stone path, then the actual temple. Then, two floors up, there is a large rooftop area with five giant towers.

This tower starts on the third floor - yeah, it's big.

And everywhere are statues, beautiful complex carvings along almost every single surface, interesting shrines throughout, and lots of strange nooks and crannies to explore. It’s hard to explain Angkor Wat, except with superlatives – it’s the biggest, most detailed, most ostentatious, most badass Hindu temple you’ll ever see.

An example of intricately-detailed wall carving…

…and it continues all along this wall.

Next I went to Bayon, the central temple in the walled city of Angkor Thom. Angkor Thom, at one point many moons past, was the capital of Cambodia – a mecca of art and culture and religion. It’s still filled with temples in various stages of disrepair – some just crumbled piles of rock, others, like Bayon, much more put together. Bayon is odd though, because approaching it, it doesn’t looks like much more than a big pile of rocks. It’s only once you get inside that you find the complex network of corridors and tall tall rooms, each with an open roof to allow for a thin shaft of light to enter. The temple works on about 3 levels, though each level meanders up and down, and the design is open-concept enough that you can often jump down from a room into the hallway below. Bayon is also slightly falling apart (more so than Angkor Wat, which is immaculately preserved, but still relatively in one piece).

Bayon: It kind of looks crappy from far away.

The fact it’s in an early stage of decay is actually what makes it my favorite (of the limited parts I’ve seen). You’ll be walking down a corridor, the walls covered in detailed carving depicting hundreds of men and elephants riding off to battle, then you turn a corner and it’s a messy pile of stones – and often the stones still have a face covered in detailed carvings of a different scene, long since fallen apart.

The temple’s slightly dilapidated nature also brings up one of the oddities of Angkor – you can go anywhere. There are a couple areas roped off because they’re doing restoration work, and the highest tower at Angkor Wat has been roped off since some tourists fell down a few months ago, but other than that, tourists have free reign. The most there will be is an occasional sign (and I mean occasional – maybe a half dozen signs total in all of Bayon) saying ‘Climb at own risk’ or ‘Do not touch’. Maybe 2 staff per temple to keep an eye on things. I saw a particularly adventurous tourist walking around Angkor Wat, by use of a 5-inch wide ledge that runs the way around the building. It's a great sense of freedom, and very very fun.


But, the big thing that makes Bayon famous are the giant smiling Buddha faces that adorn the towers on top of Bayon. Each tower has four faces – one in each direction – and right now that totals 36 faces (I believe), though apparently it was over 200 at one point. Several of the faces are over 3m tall, and many are close enough (when standing on the roof) to reach out and touch (and of course, even though they’re eight hundred years old, you can reach out and touch, because as stated previously, no rules.)

The final temple I saw on my woefully short trip to Angkor (you can buy a weeklong pass to Angkor – and people often do) was the temple Ta Prohm. Now I mentioned Angkor Wat was carefully tended, and Bayon looked a little rough around the edges. When efforts were being made to restore the temples, someone – a genius, likely – had the idea to not restore Ta Prohm – to allow the symbiotic relationship between temple and nature to continue unabated. It’s a nice temple, don’t get me wrong, but what’s truly stunning are the trees slowly enveloping the structure.

I want you to stare at this picture for a minute, then think how rare it is to see a tree forced to adapt and change shape to fit the building around it. I want you to consider that many trees in this area are over 200 years old, and how old this building truly is.

It blows my mind.