Leaving Bhutan: Druk Air flight attendants watching the plane coming back from Kathmandu to pick us up for Bangkok 8/1/05
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Thursday, August 11, 2005
King Jigme Singye Wangchuk greeting his long line of advisors as he gets on the plane to Delhi (he's got his back to us, in the light gray gho, just at the foot of the stairway).
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Noodle bowl for breakfast at the Royal Angkor Resort. Don doesn't show up in many of these pictures because he's behind the lens of the digital. Tona's camera, the 35mm, has most of the shots of him!
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This young woman sits and plays this xylophone instrument in the lobby of the hotel all day long. Her mallets are tied together with a string so that they stay the same distance apart so that the harmonies are always the same no matter where she plays.
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First Glimpse of Angkor and the Bayon
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.
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.
Foundation of the "Leper King" Terrace (so named because the statue of the king has disfiguring lichen on it), showing row upon row of seated carved figures
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Angkor Wat, At Last 8/2/05
We had been telling people all year long that as part of our trip we would visit Angkor Wat. This was shorthand for many temples in the whole area, not all of them built at the same time or by the same king, with Angkor Wat being the most well-known outside of Cambodia. Angkor Wat itself is impressive, but even more so when you have seen it in context of so many of the other temples and understand the vast scale of construction that was going on in the entire area in the 10th-12th centuries.
Quoting from my guidebook, "Angkor Wat, the largest monument of the Angkor group and one of the most intact, is an architectural masterpiece. Its perfection in composition, balance, proportions, reliefs, and sculpture make it one of the finest monuments in the world. This temple is an expression of Khmer art at its highest point in development." Thank goodness it survived the regime and the bombing campaigns in the late 1970s. It was constructed somewhere between 1113 and 1150 during the reign of Suryavarman II. Its function was probably both temple, in the king's lifetime, and tomb after his death, because of it orientation towards the west & setting sun. It's a gigantic complex: a huge rectangular plain (500 acres) bisected by a raised stone causeway leading to a gigantic five-tower structure with complex interlocking inner courtyards and pools. Out on the "plain" there are additional buildings, called libraries, symmetrically placed on either side of the causeway adjacent to reflecting basins, and the entire plain is surrounded by a large wall with highly ornate entrance gates ("gopuras"), which is in turn surrounded by a 660-foot wide moat. The moat is still filled with water, and water lilies, and we saw people swimming in it every day. The moat is crossed by the causeway, and the causeway has ornate wide handrails shaped like stone snakes (the sacred "naga"), which have seven heads under huge cobra hoods.
Inside the main building, there are long covered galleries with extensive stone bas-relief murals on them, depicting scenes from the Ramayana in amazing detail, and also one dreadful one that depicts the multiple Hindu hells and all the tortures that go on there. One famous one tells the story of the gods and demons fighting over the elixir of immortality, which is hidden under a mountain in the center of the ocean. In order to get it, they must wrap a naga around the mountain and tug-of-war, pulling the mountain first one way and then the other, churning the ocean into milk. As they do this, several magical beings emerge from their strenuous efforts: the three-headed elephant, then the apsaras (the heavenly dances) like angels springing out of the water into the sky, and finally the elixir itself, but not before Vishnu has intervened several times in favor of the gods. The 92 demons and 88 gods have Vasuki the serpent stretched out across the entire panel with the mountain in the center, riding on the back of a sea-turtle. It's incredible.
Traveling towards the interior of the main building, you reach symmetrical deep bathing pools (today, empty), and then you climb a level onto the upper terrace where the five towers dominate. An extremely steep 70-degree pitch staircase takes you to the topmost terrace. Halle and I stayed at the bottom of those stairs while Don and the boys shinnied up. Going down, they said, feels more of a challenge because you can't see the bottom of the stairs from the top.
I was prepared for Angkor to be used as a functioning Buddhist temple today, and in a way it was, but not in the way we were used to from Bhutan. There were Buddha images draped in bright orange fabric, and you could purchase incense to put a stick into a porcupine of sticks burning at its feet, but there was no chanting, and little other imagery and we didn't see the areas being used as worship space. There is an adjacent temple built elsewhere in the complex, in the 17th century I believe, where the monks congregate instead. Inside Angkor there is a sort of respectful murmuring as guides explain to tourists what they are looking at, and otherwise it's pretty quiet.
We had to pass Angkor Wat many times in the several days, because the main road leading to all the temples goes three-quarters of the way around the moat, and so we saw it in different lights and at different times of day, and it's always breathtaking.
Quoting from my guidebook, "Angkor Wat, the largest monument of the Angkor group and one of the most intact, is an architectural masterpiece. Its perfection in composition, balance, proportions, reliefs, and sculpture make it one of the finest monuments in the world. This temple is an expression of Khmer art at its highest point in development." Thank goodness it survived the regime and the bombing campaigns in the late 1970s. It was constructed somewhere between 1113 and 1150 during the reign of Suryavarman II. Its function was probably both temple, in the king's lifetime, and tomb after his death, because of it orientation towards the west & setting sun. It's a gigantic complex: a huge rectangular plain (500 acres) bisected by a raised stone causeway leading to a gigantic five-tower structure with complex interlocking inner courtyards and pools. Out on the "plain" there are additional buildings, called libraries, symmetrically placed on either side of the causeway adjacent to reflecting basins, and the entire plain is surrounded by a large wall with highly ornate entrance gates ("gopuras"), which is in turn surrounded by a 660-foot wide moat. The moat is still filled with water, and water lilies, and we saw people swimming in it every day. The moat is crossed by the causeway, and the causeway has ornate wide handrails shaped like stone snakes (the sacred "naga"), which have seven heads under huge cobra hoods.
Inside the main building, there are long covered galleries with extensive stone bas-relief murals on them, depicting scenes from the Ramayana in amazing detail, and also one dreadful one that depicts the multiple Hindu hells and all the tortures that go on there. One famous one tells the story of the gods and demons fighting over the elixir of immortality, which is hidden under a mountain in the center of the ocean. In order to get it, they must wrap a naga around the mountain and tug-of-war, pulling the mountain first one way and then the other, churning the ocean into milk. As they do this, several magical beings emerge from their strenuous efforts: the three-headed elephant, then the apsaras (the heavenly dances) like angels springing out of the water into the sky, and finally the elixir itself, but not before Vishnu has intervened several times in favor of the gods. The 92 demons and 88 gods have Vasuki the serpent stretched out across the entire panel with the mountain in the center, riding on the back of a sea-turtle. It's incredible.
Traveling towards the interior of the main building, you reach symmetrical deep bathing pools (today, empty), and then you climb a level onto the upper terrace where the five towers dominate. An extremely steep 70-degree pitch staircase takes you to the topmost terrace. Halle and I stayed at the bottom of those stairs while Don and the boys shinnied up. Going down, they said, feels more of a challenge because you can't see the bottom of the stairs from the top.
I was prepared for Angkor to be used as a functioning Buddhist temple today, and in a way it was, but not in the way we were used to from Bhutan. There were Buddha images draped in bright orange fabric, and you could purchase incense to put a stick into a porcupine of sticks burning at its feet, but there was no chanting, and little other imagery and we didn't see the areas being used as worship space. There is an adjacent temple built elsewhere in the complex, in the 17th century I believe, where the monks congregate instead. Inside Angkor there is a sort of respectful murmuring as guides explain to tourists what they are looking at, and otherwise it's pretty quiet.
We had to pass Angkor Wat many times in the several days, because the main road leading to all the temples goes three-quarters of the way around the moat, and so we saw it in different lights and at different times of day, and it's always breathtaking.
View down from the topmost gallery: the red block of stone is the top step to go back down.
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Standing by the reflecting pool on the "plain" of Angkor Wat just in front of the main building. From here you can see all five towers representing Mount Meru (ie the Himalayas). We took this picture in turn with many other tourists, so that it looks like we were here alone, but just outside the frame are lots of people waiting their turn to stand on this spot. (we all dressed up for our visit to the Wats on the first day, but soon learned that being cool was more important than being formal, and we dressed in lighter clothing on Day 2!)
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