Cambodia 2/18/2020

2/18/20

I met Mark for a jog this morning, and we ran up the street parallel to Pub Street, down two lights and then turned right towards the Royal Palace.  It was a nicer area of town for experiencing the local vibe vs the tourist trap that Pub Street was last night.  It is a dry, dusty dry season day here in Cambodia, so getting this run out in a pleasant temp was crucial

We hit the river and turned right, by the old market along the Siem Reap River, which was established in this tourist Provience in about 1920 (as our tour guide, Bahn said!)

The Khmer Mansion provided us with a really nice breakfast this morning, and I had a traditional Cambodian soup, which was peanutty and coconut milky, it was so good, I actually felt like I should be bathing in it.  Ha ha.  

Our guide picked us up at 0800, and we were off to the temples.  The first stop was a tourist pass area where we had to purchase our passes, pretty official with a photo!

We were to hit 4 temples: Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, and Boynan.  Ta Prohm was the temple where Tomb Raider was filmed, and it has large trees growing out of the blocks of the ancient temple.

Most of these temples were built in the 11th and 12 century, where as Bahn reminds us, Cambodia was kind of the center of civilization.  He is a proud Cambodian, whose dad is a Buddhist monk after serving in the military, grandparents disappeared during the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, and when he went to college he lived in a 1 bedroom apartment with 4 other students who were working and going to school full time.  

Bahn would give us a little personal insight into the Kingdom and what the politics in this Communist nation are like, and what his thoughts were on it.   Candid.

The temples were pretty spectacular, being ranked on the UNESCO top 7 wonders list, like Ha Lon bay was.  Additionally, it is the largest Hindu temple in the world, and its profile is on the Cambodian currency.  We were ok wearing shorts, since they came down to the knees.  Lots of pretty inscriptions, and he explained how this country transitioned from a Hindu country to a Buddhist one.  Most of the statues heads were missing, a victim of looting from centuries past.  This temple complex was lost to the jungle, and only renovated after the French came to imperial power in the late 19th century.  

In the temple, I received a blessing from a Buddhist monk who splashed water on me and chanted in Pali, the Buddhist prayer language.  The first step was to put an orange string of yarn around my right wrist.   Khmer is the official language of Cambodia.

The king who built these temples took only 37 years, and the temples were for Vishnu, the Hindu god with 8 arms in 8 directions.  

Siam Reap means Siam defeated which occurred in the 16th century.  Cambodia has a rich past with Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and China.  Not always a peaceful and/or harmonious.  

He also gave us a pretty grim insight to the Khmer Rouge rule.

It was a long dusty day, and the hotel served a grand BBQ,poolside. And it was nice until the political chatter took up, and the mosquitos began to bite.  Since I was tired from a day of mini van travel, I turned in, and could only imagine how the cyclists feel who are on a bike tour of this place.  And, there are a lot of them.