ANGKOR WAT

(Electricity blackouts and spotty wifi last 2 days. The heading above says Monday, but it's Tuesday here. This posted from nearby internet café. I hope.)

 

Up at 4am to get to Angkor Wat for the fabled sunrise mystique. This is the must-see #1 destination in Cambodia and probably in all of southeast Asia. A temple complex covering 20 square miles. The world’s largest religious building. A vast long-abandoned city that had a million people when London was a village of 50,000! Built in the 11^th century as a fusion of Hinduism and Buddhism. Monumental yet intricate. Awesome but pious.  Overwhelming but inviting if you dare. Towers, gates, bridges, 500ft.-wide moats, immense stone  architecture, mesmerizing temple trees growing still after 1,000 years. The symbol on the Cambodian flag! And, officially, the last of the 8 Wonders of the World.

You can Google all the names, dates, and details. Superlatives all over the place. The arrogance of Kings or their genius?  At every stop we trudged in the heat to marvel at how this world must have been. Houses and public buildings were made of wood rotted long ago, because brick and stone were reserved for emperors and the gods. The grandeur and scale of Angkor Wat is stunning.

Because Cambodia is still emerging from the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, money for restoration is pouring in from wealthy individuals (mostly Americans) and culturally sensitive countries (mostly European). It’s  an overload of sites and sights. Ten hours in the heat climbing steep ancient steps and clambering through the biggest jigsaw puzzle pieces in the world. Mid-afternoon my camera battery was exhausted and so were we, from the mid-day bus mobs/heat/overload. Dehydrated and footsore but still enthralled by this spectacular day, we crashed and slept for 12 hours. Totally worth it. Just fantastic.