An Angkor Wat Bike Ride

[David Martin]

Angkor Wat is the most amazing man-made place I’ve ever seen, though one could easily imagine it was created by the Gods. In Southeast Asia, Bagan in Myanmar comes close and some people might vote for Borobudur in Indonesia, but Angkor and the other temples around it are more vast and mysterious. Volumes have been written about it but much is still unknown. I've read that it's the biggest religious structure on earth. I’m no Angkor scholar and might be doing it a dis-service by trying to describe it with my limited knowledge, but I’ll try to give a quick thumbnail sketch, and describe re-exploring it by bike last week.

Angkor is an ancient temple-city, among a vast complex of other temples in western Cambodia. Most of it was built between about 800 and 1200 AD. Nearly all its temples are dedicated to Hindu gods, but there are Buddhist elements from the later periods. The population probably hit about one million at its peak — this while London was a village of 50,000. The Khmer empire was a great, wealthy civilization that spread to about half of what’s now Thailand, and parts of Laos and Vietnam. It had a series of 9 kings. The key to their wealth and power was water management. They were prolific canal builders and champions of agricultural output.

Angkor and the temples around it are mind boggling, but there are other ancient cities in Cambodia that while harder to reach, are nearly as amazing. And there are thousands of remote jungle and mountain temples that are vast and crammed with detailed carvings. “New” ones are discovered all the time.

There’s hardly any recorded history of Angkor. The one early description came from a Chinese traveler who visited in the late 1200’s. Most of what’s known about it comes from long texts that are carved into some of the temple walls. It’s very hard to convey the scope and majesty of Angkor. The western world thinks of it as a “lost” city that was discovered by the French in the 1800’s. It started getting European visitors in the early 1900’s and became something of a “grand tour” destination for the wealthy and intrepid, but was very hard to reach. A hundred years ago you’d take a narrow gauge train from Phnom Penh to the Tonle Sap lake, then sail by steamer across the lake to Siem Reap. The Tonle Sap is HUGE. Looking at it from the air, you’d think you were seeing an ocean. It’s fed by the Mekong and oddly, its current reverses direction twice a year.

I got obsessed with Angkor in the early 80’s but because of the war it was impossible to visit. A few years after Vietnam invaded Cambodia to put an end to the Khmer Rouge things began to open up just a crack and for years I plotted various ways of getting there, but it was SO hard. After a lot of complications, problem solving, and patience, I and a friend finally got visas in ’91. That visit was incredibly exciting, and blew through all my expectations. We flew from Vientiane to the small airstrip at Siem Reap, the gateway to Angkor. We took of at about 6 AM and I’ll never forget the sight of the morning sun reflecting on the Mekong, making its surface look like polished copper. We were 2 of just 3 foreigners at Angkor that week and were driven around in a rickety jeep, guarded by a guy with a machine gun (never used, except for some random plinking during a lunch break one day). I came back in ’05 with my wife, by boat from Laos on the Mekong. The boat trip was fabulous and I loved seeing Angkor again, but that time it was totally jammed with tourists and as crowded as Disneyland, which it almost felt like at times. Most of the visitors were Chinese, in big tour groups.

A month ago I decided to go back. I’d heard that because of covid it was really quiet these days, and the cooler December weather would be ideal. So I took an easy one hour flight from Bangkok and stayed in Siem Reap for a week, mostly exploring Angkor and other places on a rented mountain bike. The town of Siem Reap was almost unrecognizable. It's full of boutique hotels and now has Burger King, Swensen’s, etc. But it was still friendly and charming in its way and I wouldn’t quite call it spoiled, though the flash was unsettling at times. Well, way of the world, and Cambodia’s still full of places that have barely changed in the last hundred years, if one wants to experience that.

I landed on a Wednesday and rented a bike the next day. It was past noon already and getting a little warm but I thought what the heck, I’m itching to see Angkor, I’ll just head out there right now. That was a lucky decision because amazingly, hardly anyone was there and it turned out to be a perfect day. The few visitors I saw were mostly Cambodian couples and families. A lot of them wore very elaborate traditional costumes for their visit, which must have been as much of an occasion for them as it was for me.

For an amateur photographer, especially the male type, Southeast Asia can be a real treat because it has very many beautiful women who love having their picture taken, and really know how to pose for the camera. (How do they learn this skill? Maybe it's in their DNA.) Actually, the men at Angkor looked pretty good that day, too. There were lots of young ladies and couples dressed to the nines, in fabulous traditional outfits. Many had come with well equipped professional photographers. No doubt their finished portraits would be framed, hung in some important place inside the home, and admired for decades as a reminder of that day. Amidst that picture taking enthusiasm, everyone I asked was quite happy to let me, the sweaty foreigner in shorts, take their picture. I was the kid in the proverbial candy store. (In the people pictures below, know that for each one, the girl or couple would take considerable time to arrange their clothing, hair, accessories, posture, and expression, and then signal me to go ahead.)

There’s been a lot of vandalism and looting at the Cambodian temples and Angkor's suffered a lot since my visit 31 years earlier, but the sights were still fabulous. In many areas most every inch is covered with detailed carvings that tell complex Hindu stories and legends, few of which I understand. It’s a real feast for the eyes.

Beautiful life size Apsaras (spirit dancing girls) decorate a lot of the walls. They're hyper-realistic with lovely proportions and fabulous head dresses but if you look down, their feet surprise you because they're usually turned sideways, an anatomical impossibility. This has puzzled me for a long time. I’ve asked a lot of people who’ve studied Angkor and the usual answer is “I don’t know.” Two people said it was because the sculptors just couldn’t get the perspective right, and for now I’m going with that. It’s odd though, because all the other details are so accurate and lifelike.

In ’91 Angkor was filled with clouds of bats, which was a little disturbing at times, but this time I saw none. I’ve read that their guano damages the carvings, so maybe the park has gotten rid of them somehow. In another preservation measure, many of the stairways and upper areas are now closed. On my first visit everything was open and those stairways, which often are nearly vertical, were exciting ways to get bird’s eye views. Actually, on that first visit there was an Indian team that had built scaffolding up to the highest points, which they kindly let me climb to take photos. Back then, there were priceless artifacts all over, just laying in the dirt. A few may now be in museums, but I’m sure that most were looted and are now in other countries. That’s really heartbreaking, but it’s an even bigger problem at the more remote sites, where there’s no one at all to guard the treasures.

The temples all survive in one form or another but there’s no trace of the original cities, except for a few walls and stone roads — all of the wood and thatch homes disintegrated ages ago. Some of the temples are monstrous, even overwhelming. What would it be like for simple farmer, living in some one room dwelling, to see these amazing temples, coming face to face with massive images of the Gods? I can’t begin to imagine.

Not much is known about how the temples were built, and no matter how much I read about them, I just can’t wrap my head around that. The carved stones (mostly sandstone, and some laterite) were created in central areas, then floated down canals. Many of the pieces probably weigh a ton, or much more. You can see round holes in them, which people say might have gripped by big tongs, the way blocks of ice are carried. But there must be literally millions of these, and it seems impossible to picture how this was all done 1000 years ago. What’s more, a lot of these temples are on hilltops, which meant that each piece had to be hauled up by elephant, probably one at a time. The place just seems impossible to me, but there it is, and it just goes on and on.

Last week I was chatting with Dima and he asked how this empire ended. Again, I’m no expert, but have read that since building all those fabulous temples was so costly, the royal coffers may have eventually been depleted. And like many of today’s cities, Angkor may have expanded beyond the limits of its water supply. Meanwhile, the Thais and other subjugated neighbors began to fight back and reclaim territory. There may have been widespread disease or plague. And the influx of Buddhist thought towards the end, which contributed so much spiritually and artistically, may have diluted the influence of the Hindu rulers.

A few days afer the first vcisit, I hired a tuk tuk to take me and my bike to the far north end of the park, to see some of the more distant temples. They were quiet and very impressive, but what really struck me that day were the kapok trees, sometimes called silk-cotton trees. Some of them are real monsters that have taken over and destroyed temples. They have bizarre trunks that remind me of the creature in Alien. The Colonial French nicknamed them fromagers, thinking they resembled melting cheese. Being an Anglophone, I just call them cheese trees. You see them all over Southeast Asia, but the ones around Angkor are extra impressive.

I might go back in two weeks to see some distant, rarely visited temples that I’ve read about. Maybe I’ll do another installment later on. But now, some photos. I'll add more soon.

[Sean]

Thanks for the interesting history and report on your visits to this beautiful place. My theory on the feet is also that the perspective wouldn't work due to the limited space available for the carving. They probably wanted to limit how deeply they would carve the stone. That's a lot of work.

[David Martin]

Sean, other people have had the same idea about the foot carvings, and that might be correct. The weird thing is that some of those Apsara carvings do show the foot in the correct angle and look right, though the feet have been sort of foreshortened and don't stick out 6 inches or so, like actual feet do. Maybe no one will ever know for sure. Anyway thanks for your comment and here are some more photos.

The Bayon, another very famous temple near Angkor