The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

We woke up well before the crack of dawn to see the sunrise over Angkor Wat.

However fitting with our previous luck on sunrises, it was cloudy, so the sunrise was rather boring.

Angkor Wat looks most impressive from the outside, with the long bridge across the giant moat followed by the huge gate.

Way back in the corner there you can see the famous “five stone pineapples, fringed with flames”.

They are much easier to see from the temple on the hill across from it.

Inside around the bottom are tons of intricate carvings.

And hundreds more apsaras, which quite clearly have straight legs, straight hips, and feet shooting off in the wrong direction.

They also have no knees, but sometimes their legs have a weird curve in the thigh.

The top sanctuary was decorated with thousands of these lobsters.

Or maybe they are roosters?

Or maybe even some kind of weird flower?

A lot of the repeated carvings seem to have the sculptures playing a game of telephone, where they carve a symbol on one end and by the time they get across to the other it’s completely different.

The windows were barred which makes the view out not very good.

The carvings were very well preserved and on some of them you could still see traces of paint.

Or even gold leaf.

One panel showed lions in a conga line dancing on the shoulders of a line of soldiers.

Another showed a god riding a snake wearing a saddle.

But you do not need a saddle to ride a flying eagle-man. You just stand in the awkward dance position on his shoulders and it works great.

More dignified gods ride in chariots pulled by lions.

Underneath the water are crocodiles, fish, and lions with elephant trunks. Because where else would you look for an elehpant-nosed lion?

I think the guide book said this was a depiction of Hell, but it looks more like a circus. Maybe that’s the same thing.

Kerri attempted to replicate the awkward dance posture but is not nearly flexible enough. Also only men were allowed to do it.

But Matt wouldn’t even try.

And that was Angkor Wat.

Getting around Cambodia was done primarily in a remork, which is a four wheeled cart pulled by a motorcycle.

You should not feed the monkeys from your remork.

In Siem Reap this was the most common style of gas station. Can’t remember if we used green or yellow fuel.

Sometimes it would just be old glass bottles filled with a litre of fuel.

In the evening we went for dinner at a place that had traditional dancing. First was the blessing dance.

Then came the coconut dance.

This involved clacking coconut shells together.

Then came the sentiment dance, which was very long.

The boys were fighting with the girls.

They kept stealing the girl’s baskets, even though they had baskets of their own. Then the girls got mad.

Then the boys gave back the baskets and the girls fell in love with them. I’m pretty sure the moral of the story is boys are jerks but girls are stupid, so it all works out in the end.

Then came the gum-lacquer pounding dance.

This is basically a more dangerous version of jump rope.

Last was the apsara dance, where they were dressed and danced like the girls carved on the temple walls. Except that the girls carved on the temple walls do not wear shirts. So they were dressed not at all like the apsaras.

Bakong is the first temple the Khmer built out of sandstone in the 9th century.

Some of the side buildings were still built mostly out of brick.

Though it is mostly the stone chunks that survived.

Some of its lions were in very good condition.

Some even had tails.

Others were in worse condition. Yes, the rebar is original.

There were elephants running up the corners of the temple, but none of them had surviving trunks.

From up close you could tell they were clearly elephants.

The fake stone doors came complete with lion doorknockers, so they suspect that the real wooden doors (which no longer exist) probably had them too.

There were also lions above the doors.

It was a very impressive 1st temple.