Russ&Suzie

Trip Log
2012-02-20 12:21:29 (UTC)

Angkor Thom, Banteay Srei, hospital, fisheries

Good thing I'm not at dinner as lots to report! (although with a coughing person passing by, I'm not so sure it's not the better place to be--she's looking directly at me, for all that she's got a hand over mouth and about 20 feet distant!)

This morning the first excursion took us to Angkor Thom (or "the great"), a temple complex that takes up the most square footage with the "Bayon" at its center. (Angkor Wat, a single temple that we see tomorrow at sunrise, has the place of honor among this pantheon of temples as the most beautiful and completely realized as in the same class of world class sites as Taj Mahal or the Pyramids of Egypt).

But Angkor Thom holds great interest and we did get a glimpse of Angkor Wat on the way to it. Some of the surprises involved the enormous number of murals that depict not only military campaigns with the king more grandly represented (slaves, servants, soldiers physically smaller in the drawings/bas reliefs--as true in Egypt too).

The great number of fish next to boats testify to the enormous fertility of the Tonle Sap whose peculiar hydrolology I've already remarked on; in fact we saw in the evening's film an hour's worth of extensive research and projection on how to maintain and extend the fertility that gets potentially compromised by upstream dams and other built structures (like roads/dykes that could potentially compromise the annual flood that expands the surface area of the lake by a factor of three!!) it was a good film with excellent graphics and lots of highly informed advice; it and other features of our experience testify to the high level of helpful donations of compassionate smart help Cambodia has received.

John Bradshaw of Portland remarked on our way out that the hydrology of the Columbia River with its salmon fisheries might also benefit from getting together and reasoning about the competing interests and their potential harms.

Returning to the Angkor Thom, the Bayon or center part has all these amazing faces that look from every gotera (or gate that characterizes the Hindu influenced sculpture since 7th century). So each vertical structure each one of which does indeed resemble the bud of the lotus has four such faces looking in the four cardinal directions. These faces that both refer to Buddha and the king who got this going, Jayavarman VII, last and most building-ambitious of the Varman Khmer kings (I call them "Varman" because each has this as part of the name with many prefix variations.

Other parts that we then saw include the Elephant Pavilion and the Leper King Temple. The elephants that illustrate the inner walls have some self-explanatory qualities, but there's a story with the leper king, that the guide told but I must say I let that glide by as I was looking, taking pictures and drawing knowing that I have this excellent guide book that probably gives greater authority than does Soon.

But hey, I don't badmouth him much for he told on the way back from Banteay Srei or the temple of women about his youth under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. What horrors he experienced as did the whole population with killing fields all over, the reason for killing so many of their own kind never satisfactorily explained. Near the end, as the paranoia grew and grew, they killed their own inner circle and finally attacked Viet Nam so that they counterattacked and sent the Khmer Rouge out of power.

They gave us a short visit at the Angkor Children's Hospital started by a Japanese photographer, Kenzu Ito, after he found himself surrounded by children with maimed limbs when visiting the country. So this hospital that once had Bill Clinton visit with fund-raising involvements has foreign donations fund it completely. We got a tour and felt impressed with the need that should be met while the government has obvious extensive corruption and self-perpetrating qualities.

Banteah Srei likely misnamed Temple of Women from a linguistic quirk did have lots of the Indian Ramayana story in exquisite carvings of a very high quality sandstone. My guide book told that it was like Indian sandalwood carving that transmuted to this stone. All surfaces got covered.




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