We Built This City

LT
9 June
Today was our first day being real 'tourists' in Cambodia so we spent the day visiting several of the Angkor temples.  Generally dating from around the 12th century, they are still magnificent, hinting at an unbelievable royal over-the-top-ness.  Some of the temples have been relatively well-preserved, many have been partly restored with varying degrees of success, and some are being reclaimed by the jungle.  In any case they are engineering marvels, massive stone blocks carved into intricate designs, put together in enormous sprawling temples, towers and palaces, some complete with gatehouse and moat. The best-preserved is Angkor Wat, and it includes numerous baths and pools (obviously these guys liked a good swim, and didn't like to have to walk too far to have it), dangerously steep stone staircases (steps as high as your knee but not even a full footprint deep) and a moat that must be nearly 200m across (all presumably dug by hand by many thousand loyal countrymen of the day).  There has obviously been a lot of restoration work done there, but it has been very well done, and the restored parts blend in quite well with the original.  It was absolutely crawling with tourists, busloads and busloads of them.

Outside the temples there are stalls selling cold drinks, food, hats, and all manner of Cambodia souvenirs.  The stall holders border on aggressive, approaching you as soon as you get out of the tuk-tuk and following you marketing their wares until you have said 'no thanks' at least ten times. Then the person from the next stall comes over and it starts again.  But great practice for those of us who struggle with saying no!

The ancient capital city of Angkor Thom houses several impressive buildings including the Bayon temple, the royal palace and several other towers and terraces etc.  The city (about 10sqkm) has massive stone walls on each side, with an impressive entrance in each wall.  Inside the city walls at the South Gate live a herd/pack/flock... of the cutest little monkeys in all the world.  There were mums, babies, toddlers, teenagers, all fooling about, chasing each other up trees, swinging on vines etc, all out in the open, living wild in the trees within the city.  (Bang goes half the memory space on our camera.)  The other main child-friendly attraction was the elephants - and we did end up forking out big tourist dollars to ride them.  Definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and one to savour.  We were also able to hand feed the elephants with bananas, evidently you don't need to peel bananas for elephants!  The girls had a few nerves at first, maybe thinking the elephants might assume their arms or heads were edible, but we all walked away with our limbs intact.  One of the temples at Angkor Thom was partway through a massive restoration project in the 60s and 70s which involved the dismantling of some 300,000 stone blocks, which were carefully catalogued and recorded.  In the time of the Khmer Rouge all the records were destroyed, so now they have half a temple and the world's largest jigsaw puzzle.

We also visited Ta Prohm, no sign of Angelina, but we did spot a snake leisurely climbing some tree roots at an uncomfortably close distance.  Ta Prohm has many trees growing through it, and as the roots grow they dislodge massive slabs of stone.  In places the tree roots seem to 'flow' down over the temple walls.  Ta Prohm is in the most ruinous state of the temples we saw, but with no OSH personnel evident anywhere in the country, you can basically explore the ruins at will.  It all felt a bit like a Famous Five book (except no dog, and way more tourists).

Katriel's small size and blond hair made her very popular, and she ended up in quite a few of other people's photos.  And almost every official we came across who was checking tickets and passports, offered (jokingly mostly) to buy her.  Just the kind of headswell every 5 year old needs.

My big question for the day is: how did such massive and extensive temples, and a whole capital city even, come to be completely deserted, to the extent that they had grown over and were rediscovered by European settlers centuries later.  King = hero => zero....?