Wed 6/5 Siem Reap – Angkor Thom – Angkor Wat
In the morning we slept like babies all the way till nine! Then we set off for breakfast. The local hotel lackeys couldn't get their heads around why we wouldn't have breakfast at their little eatery. They're slowly getting used to the fact that we're some kind of weird Dutchmen. They go eat at the local market, they don't come back plastered at night, and on top of that they'd rather ride bikes than take a TT (read: tuk-tuk)!
Right beside the exit from our narrow little alley there's a market for the locals. For your average Farang a repulsive place where everybody sits and sells on packed dirt, but for us a great experience and loads of photographic material. I should mention that although I thought I was sacrificing myself for art by lugging along my dear wife's DSLR (Canon D50 – a giant glass lens), which together weighs as much as all the rest of my stuff put together, compared to Patrik I'm a total wimp. He's got an extra special backpack for his photo gear which, among other things, survives a dive to the bottom of the Nile and has the dimensions of an oak nightstand (and is just as solid). In the backpack he has a DSLR as big as mine, but on top of that 3 giant lenses, several glass filters, lens hoods, and in the second backpack a steel tripod weighing 5kg!
So, back to the market. They sell everything here that can be eaten. Well, at least by local standards. Tropical fruit (pineapple, papaya, dragonfruit, breadfruit, mango, the unbelievably stinky durian (supposedly as delicious as it is stinky), rambutan, lychee etc.) Vegetables of every kind, fly-covered meat (pork heads, tails, offal, but also a lovely sirloin etc. As for poultry, you could see it both alive (well, only sort of, since it was dangling by one leg) and as a perfect anatomical cross-section of a hen cut in half, egg included.
The local faces and the omnipresence of children (scrabbling around their selling mothers) gave us an endless supply of subjects to shoot. Photographing kids is apparently a passion I caught from my wife. What's more, it's great that the locals react very positively to having their children photographed and usually arrange them into a better pose:-)
Photographing adults, especially in poor conditions, is sometimes unpleasant for me, because I don't want them to think I'm shooting their misery out of spite or something. Luckily Cambodians are a hugely cheerful nation and in most cases they just smile at us happily. Actually, nobody has reacted irritably yet, let alone nastily. After a very interesting walk through the market we headed across the main road to the other side for breakfast. Crossing the main road here takes a fair dose of cheek and courage, because there are about 4 lanes of mopeds and TTs pouring along, with totally overloaded trucks in between and the odd car here and there. In the end a big shiny Landcruiser almost got us. Evidently a civilised car, but not so much the driver.
Life here happens along the road. Food stalls, plastic chairs, markets, petrol stands (in PET bottles!) We picked a random "restaurant" and had noodle soup with assorted parts of a chicken (excellent) and tea with it. We spent ages debating whether we could drink the tea poured into a glass with ice when we had no idea what water they'd made the ice from. In the end we discreetly poured the first glass of iced tea into the bin and finished off the pot of tea without ice. A few hours later, somewhere else, we innocently had an excellent mango shake (made from crushed ice, of course).
After breakfast we walked back to our Hilton and negotiated a ride to the Angkor Wat temple complex. Since I was expecting an important conference call at two local time, we preferred to go by TT so I'd make it back in case there was no signal out there. In the end, though, a local tout talked us into having a personal TT for three days, from dawn until night, anytime, for a flat price of $55 plus apparently $5 tip for the driver. Given the hotel price of $5/night it seemed like a lot to me, but since we'd haggled it down from $75 and it works out at CZK 150/person/day, we took it. As Patrik said, the commodity that's scarce for us is time, and on bikes we'd have managed less.
Angkor is an absolutely unbelievable affair. In short: around 1110 Suryavarman II managed in this region to consolidate the squabbling tribes and joined their forces to his own benefit. He decided to expand the system of palaces and temples of his predecessor from sometime in the ninth century. It's hard to put into words what he pulled off, but imagine Notre Dame in Paris (roughly the same period) or Hradčany in Prague. Except that here there are several dozen of them in an area the size of all of inner Prague, and some of them are much, much bigger! The whole thing is built of sandstone and joined without any mortar. A large part (about half) of the sandstone blocks is decorated with reliefs, often very intricate ones (dancing girls etc.)
\'Today we managed to visit two of the many temple complexes (Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat) and we simply couldn't stop marvelling. 1000-year-old temples with complete ceilings, columns covered in Sanskrit, pools, statues etc. and all of it purely out of stone!
The entire temple system (Angkor Thom covers an area of 3x3km) was part of a very sophisticated water system. Angkor Wat is surrounded by a moat 150m wide!
A few kilometres to the west the ancient Khmers built a giant water reservoir around the year 890. Then they apparently had too many pools, so a few km to the east, around the year 1002, they made themselves a Lipno! It's a rectangular reservoir measuring 2.2x8km with an average depth of 7m, which gives about 123 million litres of water:).
