Angkor Wat: Overwhelming feat and it changes you, but it is up to you how…

—

by

Alfred O’Neill
in

While this post focuses on Angkor Wat, I have to start in the middle of the full day guided tour we took. This specific temple was the most haunting and impressive; each tower and column with a different carved face. Each face stood perhaps 40 feet tall.

The feel of the mystical and painfully human and divine all combine to leave you feeling almost lost in this historic center of worship. Altogether, a trip worthy of multiple days, but do not expect anything but endless awe and a sense of what went right and what went wrong aobut humankind, that such magnificence centures later leads to genocide.

Angkor Wat: The original temple, a 1,000 years old, was built with a quarter-mile of lake on all four sides. This represented the presence and power of water in the world; the temple, equally enormous and almost impossible to take it in its complexity of path and bas-reliefs covering every piece of life and history of the Cambodians, is grayish-blue, sandstone, and maze of worship. The single large tower at the center is both phallic in its fertility meaning, but also regal in its reaching for the heavens.

In the 412 acres, 28 kilometer area, hundreds of smaller temples built over 500 years, with similar construction rise, all with their single tower facing Angkor Wat. You go to this UNESCO site and the mysteries as they unfold only seem to lean to deeper pools of secret histories. All culminating in the apocryphal genocide of Pol Pot.

Our tour guide for the day, with his brother driving the ubiquitous Tuk-Tuk motor bike and cab in tow, told us that when Pol Pot was removed, so many traditions and fundamental ways of life had been destroyed people came to Angkor Wat to study the cultures to re-learn their own culture.
For the dozens and dozens of smaller temples, eaahc is in a different state of decay; we learned that while the safron-clad monks lived on the pproperty and tended to the basic maintence, many countries had stepped in to help restroe the temples; the negotiation between the monks, UNESCO and the country was delicate and yet all focused on the right goal: preservation of one of humankinds great sites.

Comments

Leave a comment