Angkor Wat

After taking a month or two off from the Latin American ruins, we felt it was time to go back and explore some ruins here in Cambodia. The Temples of Angkor is the heart and soul of the Cambodian people. They look to these temples for inspiration and national pride as they struggle to rebuild their lives after the Pol Pot's regime. Some people spend a week visiting all the temples and others like ourselves just spend a day seeing and absorbing a small portion of what could take several days. The temples of Angkor are the perfect blend of artistic carvings and structure as well as spiritual devotion. Of the hundreds of temples here, the Bayon, Ta Prohm, and Angkor Wat are the three most magnificent temples due to their size, scale and symmetry. The temples were built between 9th and 13th century.
Since we only had day to visit Angkor, we decided to get up at 4:30 am and go watch the sunrise. The Tuk Tuk picked us up at our hostel and drove us out to Angkor Wat where we sat and watched the sunrise over the temple. It was beautiful- SO much better then the sunrise we watched in Tikal (Guatemala). It was beautiful, although Heather only got to see the beginning before she feel asleep on the ruins! When she woke up, we walked through Angkor Wat, the mother temple due to its unbelievable structure and size. Angkor Wat is the largest religious building in the world. After we walked through, we headed to the ancient city of Angkor Thom to see Bayon and Baphuon. The City of Angkor Thom was built by Angkor's greatest king, Jayavarman VII and who built Bayon around 1200. Although Angkor Wat is the mother temple, Bayon is Angkor's most stunning temple do to its eerie faces that stare down at you while you walk around. Apparently there are 216 faces of Avalokiteshvara watching over the tourist as they explore this memorable temple. From here we traveled by tuk tuk and stopped at the Terrace of Elephants, Terrace of the Leper King, Phnom Bakheng, Ta Keo until we arrived at Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm is famous for two reasons, one being that Tomb Raider and Two Brothers were filmed here. The other reason is that it has started to be taken over by jungle vegetation. As we walked through the narrow corridors, we saw the roots of several huge trees hug the stonework of this temple. It was quite a sight to be able to see a small vision of what the archeologist's saw when they re-discovered these temples. Our day visit here was incredible and definitely a different sight then what we had been used to from L.A. The Mayan and Inka ruins were big stone buildings focused around the astronomical calender, where these temples display exquisite artistic stone carvings. Both similar in the sense of being big stone buildings, yet the feelings you get from walking around from both is so different. We both loved it and wish we had another day or two to explore the other temples, but our time is too short in SE Asia!! (but whats new!)