Today was hellishly packed, both with stuff and with loot (as you can see from the itinerary). Even though I slept horribly, we got up at 4:30 as planned and by five we were sitting in the TT racing off towards the sunrise over the temples. Our TT guy knows us a bit by now, so we skipped the whole string of farangs heading for Angkor Wat (Lonely Planet writes about the sunrise at the Wat) and he took us a bit further on to the Phnom Vakheng temple. That one sits on a fairly high hill (in season the farangs ride up there on elephants), so for the first hour we had it completely to ourselves!
Once we'd photographed it enough, including from the tripod and including the super quick sunrise, we ran back down again. On the temples around here (all of them from the 10th to the 12th century) three construction details basically grab you:
# extremely steep stairs. They look like somebody laid them on their side by mistake. A step is about 12 cm wide but 25–38 cm high. It's pretty hard to walk on them and we never figured out why the Khmers did it that way.
# Door frames, or jambs. Imagine a frame made on both sides from a sandstone block 70 cm wide, 300 cm high and 15–30 cm thick. On top of it an equally massive lintel and the whole thing covered with a very fine relief pattern. Leaving aside the fact of how they got it here and set it in place (for building one of the temples they had 300,000 people and 6,000 elephants!), nobody will ever explain to me how they made that block! How, without a drill, dynamite, an angle grinder, a router etc., did they manage to make several thousand frames like that???
# Roofing – these days we know plenty of roofing materials (clay tiles, concrete tiles, asbestos cement, aluminium, slate etc.). The best of them boast a guarantee of a few decades. But do you know one that will keep from leaking without repair for 1,100 years? Here they have it, and everywhere. They simply have roofing made of shaped sandstone blocks, smoothed on top into the shape of tiles, and from below forming a kind of self-supporting truss. Each „tile“ about a metre long and in the upper part some 40 cm thick.
After sunrise it was time for breakfast. The TT guy drove us to the elephant terraces (Phime Anakaz), where I was chased incredibly long and persistently by a girl of about eight selling silk scarves. She walked with me for at least 30 minutes, climbed to the top of the pyramid, went around the entire temple and kept grinding away: „Hello sir, silk scarf, very nice, you buy your mom, your girlfriend, your wife. I make you cheap price, ok, morning price, 3$, ok 3 for 5$, I have different colors, OK 3 for 5$, morning price, I make you discount, I go school, no money, you buy, OK 2$, nice scarf, nice with butterfly, I make you cheap price...etc.etc., over and over again. I feel terribly sorry for those kids, I imagine my own girls having to feed themselves like that from the age of five, but as Koubek says in his Kari stories: „You can't feed a billion.“ It tears my heart out, I can't buy that junk, we've got small backpacks, but now and then, when Patrik isn't looking, I go soft and give them a dollar without buying anything.
From this pyramid-shaped structure from the end of the tenth century we really needed to get to breakfast. The TT took us to a classic tourist trap with plastic chairs and Coca Cola in front of the Preah Khan temple. The price for breakfast was three times what it was in town yesterday and it wasn't even very good ($11). But we felt we'd already been roaming around half the day on an empty stomach and food was a necessity. We fixed the taste in our mouths by buying a whole pineapple cut into pieces, sold to us for $1 by an old lady on the bridge over the moat.
Preah Khan is another giant complex, which we walked through in full from north to south, and along the way there were about thirty sets of door frames (see above). 19 frames and rooms, then the centre and another 19 in the southern wing. Originally the building was symmetrical around its centre towards all four points of the compass, and from all four a monumental gate leads at the end of a stone causeway lined with statues of guardians.
In many places a several-hundred-year-old tree grows out of the roof or the wall, see photo. It looks unbelievable even in the flesh. After going through the whole complex we had fresh mango from some other kids, which within about 45 minutes I had to carry off at a jog into the forest, by then in an almost liquid state, and I sweated a lot (A LOT!) at the thought that I wouldn't make it to the forest in time! Good thing I was lugging around a big bottle of water bought from yet other kids, so I replaced the paper with the Arab jug method. Later on, just to be safe, I had plain rice for lunch, but the suspicion of a more serious case of the runs wasn't confirmed, it was just my body's usual reaction to certain fruit (sometimes a pear in Prague does the same to me :) )
After successfully waking the TT guy up (the third time today), we set off for a decent toilet (it's interesting how a few primitive achievements of Western civilisation like running water, soap and a paper towel can make you happy). BTW the toilet costs 2000 riel (0.5$ for farangs, 500 riel for locals, and free for holders of an Angkor ticket. And no wonder, when it costs $20 a day!
Then we went to two smaller temples (Thommanon and Chan Sai Thevoda). The first of them represents the method of „conservation“ of monuments (gather up and put together whatever survived) and the competing (Chinese) method of „reconstruction“ of monuments. You just collect what's there and brutally build the rest. See photo. Ta Prohm was next in line, after I'd polished off a mountain of plain rice. It's the temple where they shot the Hollywood blockbuster Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, but it wasn't all that well preserved. I was desperately looking for a place in it where I could catch some sleep. I had the feeling the sunrise hadn't been this morning but something like the day before yesterday. On top of that I couldn't shake the feeling of „Ducks, ducks, ducks“ – anyone who's seen „Rozpuštěný a vypuštěný“ will easily get it.
We also dragged ourselves up the giant pyramid-shaped Ta Keo, where another mafia „Buddhist woman“ annoyed us. It's always a bald ugly woman in a monk's robe who occupies the centre of every palace, puts a statue of Buddha there and forces a stinking incense stick into the hand of everyone who walks in. Then she very rudely asks for a dollar! They started to bother me extremely after I saw one of them leaving in a taxi. Driving around by car here is a pretty big luxury, only for about 10% of people. I don't mind giving money to kids, but I'm not giving this extortion mafia a single penny any more! Hopefully Buddha will forgive me :)
The last duck of the day was supposed to be Pre Rup. A pretty interesting and tall temple from the year 961, all made of brick and solid, i.e. it has no interior spaces, just the main pyramid structure and a few towers. Except it turned out to be another farang trap à la yesterday's sunset over the lake. When I saw the number of farangs at the top, I said we'd had enough ducks! After a bit of persuading Patrik joined in and we headed a little way back, where at the Sraz Srang reservoir we again saw an amazingly photogenic village full of kids and everyone else sprawled out in front of their houses and by the lake. Patrik lent me his precious gem among lenses (Canon US 135mm 2.0), which is absolutely brilliant for portraits from a few metres away, and a photographic harvest ensued :). At the end of the village we also bought some fruit at the market and finally headed home. We had dinner right in front of the hotel and surprisingly it was not only very cheap ($1.5) but also extremely good! (Chicken curry with rice). Then just to finish off the mosquitoes (leaving the window open wasn't a good idea), catch up on the diaries, a bit of planning and off to bed. No Cambodian national dance tonight :).
