Cambodia: Siem Reap and the mysterious city of Angkor
- Where To Go Next By I&P
- Jan 18, 2023
- 5 min read
We finally arrived in Cambodia, my parents' birth country. I had been wanting to visit it for quite some time, especially with my parents.
When the plane approached Siem Reap, we saw that the land was all flat and brown, covered in jungles and swamps, burnt by the sun, exactly how I would picture the area.
After successfully meeting my parents at the aiport, we took a windy Tuk Tuk ride to our hotel.
Siem Reap is a vibrant small town with essentially low buildings: mostly touristic shops, massage parlors and restaurants, but also a few banks and weirdly more pharmacies than we would expect (we think it is because tourists tend to get sick there 🤢).
The night market around Pub Street is especially lively with loud music, a lot of light decorations and all sorts of food, including fancy desserts.
We just needed to learn how to multiply by 4000 as Cambodians use interchangeably USD and Khmer Riel KHR (with the popular change rate of 1USD = 4000 KHR, or sometimes a little bit more). 🙄
The following days we hired a Tuk Tuk driver for 18USD/day to visit the majestic city of Angkor.
After paying the tourist entrance fee of 62USD for 3 days (former Cambodian nationals and their descendants with a K in their visas do not need to pay but you need to prove you can speak Cambodian 😅), we started our visit of Angkor.
Angkor was a flourishing city between the 9th and 15th century, and capital of the Khmer empire. It stretches over 400km2 (4 times the size of Paris) and may have been populated by more than 1M inhabitants at the peak of the Khmer empire. The city was abandoned after the 15th century for unknown reasons (potentially a combination of drought followed by flood, and the sacking of the city by the neighboring empire that is now Thailand).
The map below shows the Siem Reap area all the way to the Tonle Sap lake, and the known sites of Angkor, including Banteay Srei on the top right.
Angkor was rediscovered in the 17th century and continuously restored, especially the 200 temples, among which the most famous one, Angkor Wat.
Angkor Wat (Small Angkor for Cambodians) is the temple that represents Cambodia, especially on its flag 🇰🇭. Surrounded by vast fields, it is itself a very wide complex with long corridors, sculpted murals featuring mythic stories such as The Churning of the Ocean of Milk or stories of wars between Khmers and Chams. The main part of the temple in the center of the complex can only be accessed through a very steep flight of stairs, but gives access to a gorgeous view of the surrounding fields, where so many people wearing traditional clothes for the occasion wait their turn to take photos.
It was an unbelievable experience to walk in those corridors and discover Cambodia's history and myths with my parents.
Then we drove to Angkor Thom (Big Angkor), which is 4 times bigger than the site of Angkor Wat.
Like many other temples, this second site that has 4 gates, one for each of the cardinal points, is surrounded by a moat filled with water. This one can be crossed by the south gate bridge featuring the Churning of the Ocean of Milk. In this Hindu myth, Devas (guardian gods) and Asuras (demon gods) are holding the snake god Naga entwined around a mountain to churn the ocean and, with the help of the god Vishnu, reveal the Amrita, the elixir of immortality. The North gate bridge also features the same story but the statues were damaged.
On the way, we visited the Elephant terrace, which was being renovated, but you could still visit the interior of the wall that constitutes the terrace: a very thin corridor with one of the walls carved with many, many bas-reliefs.
We finally arrived at the main attraction of Angkor Thom, the Bayon, the temple with 200 faces. This was the main temple of the ancient city of Angkor and is simply immense, a real maze of corridors, even if the outside seems to be just a pile of rocks. It is so surprising how people were able to build this at the time. Maybe it was built by aliens! 🤣
It was unfortunate though that the last level of the temple was being renovated and not accessible.
Then we visited a smaller, less crowded temple, the Ta Keo
To finish the first day, we went to Ta Prohm, that became famous because it was featured in the movie Tomb Raider. This temple has the specificity that, not only one but multiple enormous trees are clinging to walls of the temple without crushing them, as if the rock wall and the tree were living as one organism.
From a distance, the trees seem like giant alien hands grabbing a piece of the temple 👽.
The second day, we started with Preah Khan, another important site but less restored than the other ones.
The temple itself is a four set of gates going from each cardinal point to a central point where you'll find a mini stupa. The carvings, especially on the upper parts of the gates, are very detailed.
Next to Preah Khan, you can find a perfectly rectangular artificial lake, the Jayatataka Baray, in the middle of which lies a square island where you can find the Neak Poan. This temple is located in the middle of a pond, which is in the middle of an island, that's in the middle of a lake 🤪. The Jayatataka Baray was nice to cross as it had some lotus and dead trees rising from the water, making it a beautiful scenery.
On the other side of the lake, you will find another temple called Ta Som which means Venerable Som. It's another temple with four gates representing each of the cardinal points, and where one of the gates had been "imprisoned" by the roots of a tree, which makes a nice Instagram photo.
We then drove quite far to get to Banteay Srei, one of the smaller but still one of the most magnificent temple complexes of Angkor, located 25km north of the rest of the temples. The temple is divided in 2 parts with a central temple and a public temple, both characterized by red limestone rocks.
The central temple was probably for elites, and the public temple was in the shape of a street with small colonnades on each side.
A lot of gates and walls have very minutious carvings which led to contemporary authorities to rename this temple Banteay Srei - temple of women, as it was believed that only women could have made those carvings.
We finished our tour of Angkor with Pre Rup, a structure made of 3 stupa on top of a platform 20m above ground. Even though it has not been restored, the temple is still impressive especially during sunset.
We spent the next day resting, getting a foot massage and visiting the city of Siem Reap itself, starting with the royal residence, followed by the temples of Wat Bo and Wat Preah Prom Rath.
Check out more photos of Siem Reap and its impressive temples on our Instagram @wheretogonextbyinp.
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