We woke up bright and early the morning after arriving in Siem Reap, to find a marvelous breakfast buffet in the hotel. One of my favorite options was choose your own noodle and greens, which were quickly boiled in a wire basket, placed in a bowl, covered with a ladle-full of savory broth and then topped with scallions, cilantro, chili slices. Delicious. The kids, I think, opted for the crusty French bread. We tried dragon fruit, which looks like a white kiwi on the inside and is bright magenta on the outside. Then we headed out with Wanna for the morning's agenda: Angkor Thom.
Angkor Thom is the vast city that was enclosed by a square stone wall measuring almost 2 miles on each side. In the center of each wall is a huge gopura or entrance gate, crowned by a tower with four heads on it looking in the four compass directions. Leading up to the gate are two long lines of 54 beings each holding onto the body of a naga (sacred cobra): "demons" on one side (grumpy faces, bulging eyes) and "gods" on the other (serene, human-like faces). Many of the heads and arms have been lopped off over the centuries and some have been replaced with reproductions.
Inside the gates once enclosed a city of 1.5 million people, but their wooden or thatch dwellings have long vanished, leaving only scattered monuments, towers, foundation terraces, and the central temple of the Bayon right in the middle of the square city. Today a paved road connects the various sites and our tour bus sidles up to each one in turn, nudging past the stalls of T-shirt, sarong, tablecloth, scarf, silk purse, film, and postcard vendors. Monkeys run rampant along the section of road just inside the South Gate, where we enter and leave Angkor Thom.
The Bayon is an amazing building: a large, dark-gray stone structure with 54 towers, each one with four faces looking in the cardinal directions. The faces are massive, each one different, each one serenely smiling. On the lower galleries, bas-reliefs depict victory of the Khmer over the neighboring Cham (Vietnamese) and Chinese, and scenes from daily life in the 1170s. We spent the morning wandering around the terraces and gaping, along with throngs of Korean and Japanese tourists, at the amazing construction.
