This forlorn little country contains one of the ugliest places on earth and one of the most beautiful.
As you approach Angkor Wat from the west there is no frame of reference. Just as the moon appears larger when it is near the horizon, the three main towers loom so large that they must be close by - immediately behind the outer wall. In fact, as you set out to cross the moat they are still more than a kilometer away. Trust me, no photograph can convey this. Few structures in the world are at once so large and so graceful.
But Angkor Wat is just one building in a ruined city that was the same area as New York is today and that was home to a million people at a time when there were no more than 50,000 living in London. There are over 100 temples within one day’s drive, built over a period of 600 years.
Our favorite, and the favorite of many, is Ta Prohm - the temple that’s been consigned to the jungle. There is a sense of a battle being fought between the buildings and the trees on a timescale very different to our own - faster than, say, a wrestling match between sea urchins, slower than India’s assault on the rest of Asia. Most of the trees here are silk cotton. Their bark is smooth and pale like bone, so that the temple looks like it is being torn apart by giant skeletal hands, moving at a thousand years per mile.
If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then the stones have allies in the forest. The banyan is a tree that grows on other trees, competing with them for light and moisture and ultimately killing them. Above this much-photographed door, a banyan slowly strangles a silk cotton as it in turn tries to tear down the wall of the central sanctuary.
Compared to Mayan or Egyptian pyramids, the variety of designs here is extraordinary. The Bayon: it looks like a pile of bricks. It isn’t. Look closer and each side of each of the 54 towers resolves into the enigmatic smile of Jayavarman VII.
Banteay Srei. All the carvings here are beautiful, but what I loved about this jewel-box of a temple is the fractal design. Click on the image above to see what I mean - I have annotated the picture on Flickr.
The Terrace of the Leper King. Ministers of Tourism in half the countries of the world would kill to have an attraction with a name as good as that, to hell with what it looks like. Here many people walk right past it on their way from the Terrace of Elephants to the North Gate of Angkor Thom and on to Preah Khan. And then there’s the River of a Thousand Lingas…