::A Geek in Korea::

We had to be up and out of the guest house to meet out tuk tuk driver at 6:00 for our second day of touring temples around Siem Reap. We had some fruit and granola bars for breakfast and were back in the tuk tuk as quickly as we could. We were on our way without any difficulties.

We arrived first at Banteay Kdei, and had the entire complex to ourselves. It has a rather simple layout, and you can walk straight through the temple. We did a quick looping tour to see the sights, then went on to the highlight of the day.

Walking around Ta Prohm is a very unique experience. The people that help preserve and maintain Cambodian historical sites have decided to keep it in a more “natural” state than most of the other temples. This means that while work to stabilize and prevent further collapse of the temple is happening, their goal isn’t to alter the state of the temple significantly from it’s period of “rediscovery”. This means it’s easy to walk around imagining you’ve discovered this long forgotten “lost” temple in the jungle, as long as you ignore the walkways and some railing they’ve installed for some moderate safety and access concerns, that is.

Ta Prohm is by far my favorite temple, simply because of the gigantic strangler figs and silk-cotton trees that have grown into the temple structure. Seed deposited by birds will grow roots that push out the blocks of the temple as they grow. Gradually the tree will envelop and “support” the walls, but upon the death of the tree cause the collapse of the entire structure. These trees were enormous, and they had brought down mighty walls. It was incredible to see these giant trees rising out of the walls of the temple from ruins.

Ta Keo, the next temple on the list, had incredibly steep stairs. All the temples had extremely steep, deeply weather worn steps, but this was fairly ridiculous. We climbed to the top and managed to not fall to our deaths. When we got to the top of the temple, we sat down and ate a snack. As we were eating, a small boy no older than six climbed up the steps to try to see us some postcards. He was working really hard for his money. We didn’t buy the postcards.

“Do you like candy?” The boy’s lights lit up.

“YES!” he said with enthusiasm.

We gave him the candy we had been giving to everyone. He went into the inner hall of the temple and quickly unwrapped his prize. The next time I travel in a country with poor children, I’ll bring a lot more candy with me. Seeing children’s faces light up was a really good memory.

The next two  temples, Thommanon and Chao Say Tevoda were literally across the road from each other. They wouldn’t have been worth visiting by themselves, but together they were easy enough to see that it wasn’t a big deal to see them both. We happened to land at these sights when they were being hit heavy by Chinese tour groups. Thommanon was undergoing serious restoration by a Chinese group.

Each of the sites gets maintained by different countries with international teams of experts. I saw flags for the French, Japanese, and Chinese groups, as well as a group that relied on International donors. I don’t recall seeing an American or Korean flag heading up any of the restorations.

After we finished up these temples, we told our tuk tuk driver our next destination. It wasn’t on any of our maps, and we didn’t know how far it was, but we had gotten some advice about seeing it on the blog, and found out how to get there with the help of the tour guide on the plane. We should have known it was far when the tuk tuk driver sighed, then smiled for us to get in. Our next adventure in Cambodia was Tonlé Sap, the floating village.