The Second Day of Temple Visits

I also wanted to visit the outer temples again, in particular Banteay Srei. So when I booked on for the tour of the closer temples, I also booked a second day that would take me out to the farther ones as well. There was a guy who wanted to go as well and was waiting for a second person to join him. My participation meant he could go.

I had changed guesthouses by then, so I had to make my way back to the Sawasdee Angkor Inn to meet up with Matei and our guide to head out to Banteay Srei.

Again, the changes to the area are tremendous. There is now a nicely paved road out to the park boundary. Then the road becomes a bit rougher once again, but there are now people living all along the road, where it was a road through the jungle before with nobody to disturb the tranquillity, other than the sound of the motorcycles.

Our first stop was the temple of Pre Rup. It is dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. It is made of three kinds of stone, quarried locally. There is a fairly rough, porous volcanic stone that was used for the base of the temple. Sandstone covers the middle areas. Its softness allows for the carvings and detailed reliefs. And the stupas on top were made of bricks. It was another style of temple in the area, but otherwise was not that remarkable.

Soon we were heading off some 30 or 40 kilometers to Banteay Srei, or the Citadel of the Women. When I visited the first time, it was described as very beautiful owing to its having been constructed of pink sandstone, where other temples had been constructed of other colours of sandstone. In fact, all the temples were apparently constructed using pink sandstone, but time and jungle changed the colour of many of them to other hues. Somehow Banteay Srei's colour stayed. I was looking forward to seeing it again. When we arrived, I was amazed. Again. Last time, visitors arrived and there was a simple parking area. A walkway led into the jungle and ended at the temple. There had been some restoration work in progress, but there were only a few visitors, owing to the distance and the fact that the park didn't allow tour buses in. Tuk tuks were not even allowed. All travel in the park had to be done by either bicycle of motorbike. The resulting difficulties of getting out that far conspired to make it so the temple was relatively uncrowded.

Not so this time. Now there is a great big parking lot, and in high season it must be full with tour buses, which are now allowed to travel the park roads. There is a fairly impressive visitor receiving building and there are some nice interpretive panels showing the development of the Angkor temples against the timelines of some other structures in other parts of the world.

Then you proceed out past the visitor center to the path that leads to the temple. And the hordes of people must be horrendous. Even in this low season, there were too many people to manage getting a people-less photo easily.

It is still a beautiful temple.

And on the way out, there is both a very good interpretive center telling about Banteay Srei, as well as a rather large shopping area. It was a bit sad to see it had changed to that. Progress, I suppose.

Then we headed back towards the main temple complexes. On the way out we had passed the Landmine Museum. Ten years ago, on the main road to Angkor Wat, there was the residence of a man who had been with the Khmer Rouge as a child. He had laid many landmines. He had had a gun that was bigger than he was. He had worked for the regime. Then the Vietnamese came and “liberated” Cambodia. He switched to their army and laid more landmines and fought people he had previously been aligned with. Then the UN came and freed Cambodia from the Vietnamese and he was freed from his soldier life. And he came to understand what he had been doing. He saw the horrors that landmines unleashed on humans. And he decided to do something about it. So he started going out into the fields and countryside and defusing landmines.

When we see people doing that sort of work these days, they are in full protective gear. They have metal detectors and other kinds of detecting equipment. They carefully walk over the ground trying to locate landmines and other ordinance. When discovered, the explosives are disposed of, usually by destroying them. Those people look like aliens with all their gear on.

This man didn't do any of that. He would go out to a field armed with a couple of sticks and a hunting knife. He had no protective gear. He had no detecting equipment. He did have the knowledge of where he had placed many landmines himself. He had his wits. He had intimate knowledge of many types of landmines and other explosive devices. And with the simple tools of a couple of sticks, a knife and his wits, he defused thousands and thousands of landmines. He would take the defused mines home and pile them in a shack. Over time, people heard of him and started to come to see the results of his work. And his home became a museum. He faced a lot of opposition because of his methods. The authorities felt he was encouraging people to engage in that sort of reckless and dangerous endeavour. They would periodically confiscate his defused mines and other devices in an effort to shut him down and make him stop. But he kept on with his mission, to rid the country of landmines and make it safe for his people.

But his museum kept growing. And he had another growing sideline as well. He would take in children affected by landmines. Orphans, children of those maimed by landmines and other explosives became his charges. As the needs of those children grew, he needed a better place to house it all. He wanted his museum to become accredited. But the authorities refused him because of his dangerous practices. In order to obtain accreditation as a museum and orphans' charity, he would have to give up the way he demined land. Unable to take the training necessary to become an accredited deminer, and wanting to take care of his orphans, he gave up defusing landmines. His orphanage became accredited as a result and he moved to a location that was more suitable, but much farther from Siem Reap, now along the road near Banteay Srei.

But he never forgot his mission, and in the end he couldn't give up his strong with to participate in making Cambodia safe from landmines. He found sponsorship to become a licensed deminer. Now he wears the protective gear. He follows the procedures and safety rules for the proper demining of a tract of land. And he is far slower at the process of clearing land than he used to be. But at least he is still doing what his conscience tells him he must. And where the museum was in a shack before, now it has a pretty flash facility now. It was quainter though in the shack.

After the museum, we headed back to the main area of the park for lunch. We passed back through the pastoral villages and rice fields. It really is a nice drive.

Following lunch, we visited three more temples. The first of these was Ta Som. It was style much like Ta Prohm. It was built in honour of the king's wife. It wasn't very big though. Shouldn't the wife be at least almost as important as the king?

While we were there, in the restoration area, there were a bunch of men working hard putting something back together. Suddenly up on top there was a commotion. Our guide listened in, and called up to the workers. Apparently they had just found a rather venomous snake nestled in the rocks.

This temple also had a fairly impressive tree sitting on top of it.

From Ta Som we headed to a temple called Neak Pean. Initially, I didn't recognize this one from my first visit. I had come early in the rainy season and there had been no water around it. Now there was water everywhere around it. Had it not been for the walkway, it likely would have been inaccessible.

This one was some sort of healing area. There was a central pool, this time filled with water. On the central tower two nagas coil around and their tails entwine.

It is a square temple, and there are four smaller square pools around it, one on each side. Each smaller pool is dominated by an animal and holds sway over one of the ancient elements, earth, air, fire and water. Unfortunately, I forget the order of the elements, so I don't remember which animal was associated with each element.

But in the north pool, there is the head of an elephant.

In the west pool is a horse.

The south pool is ruled by a lion.

And the east pool has a man. After being diagnosed by a doctor, the sick would go to Neak Pean. They would bathe in the appropriate pool according to which of the elements was out of balance. This was their treatment.

The final temple for the day was a visit to Preah Khan. This was dedicated to the king's father and was quite large.

This tree had fallen over in the past couple of weeks during a storm and had damaged a part of the temples exterior. Nature will always win, no matter how we try to preserve the past, I suppose.

We wandered through the temple, with the guide pointing things out to us, that unfortunately had reached the point that they no longer really mattered to me. I decided that I wasn't coming back to the park the next day to view things I wanted to take a longer time with. I was getting templed out.

But it was still interesting to see the apsara hall. Apsaras are celestial dancing women who are ethereally beautiful. This one hall in Preah Khan was filled with hundreds of carvings of the apsaras.

And of course, there were more trees doing their thing to the temple.

After finishing our walk through Preah Khan, we headed back for town through Angkor Thom. Because it was late in the day, there were far fewer people there and our guide stopped at one of the entrances to the city to allow us a photo opportunity with no people. It was nice.

Then we headed past the Bayon. Again with no people, our guide stopped to let us have a photo of the site. And he seemed to know something that others didn't know, for he told us that the pool in front allowed a great reflection of the Bayon for a photo. It was indeed very nice.

And then it was back to town after another exhausting but awe-inspiring day amongst the temples of the Angkor empire.