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Angkor Wat

After a few days in Phnom Penh, we took the bus 5 hours north to Siem Reap, the town closest to Angkor Wat. We purchased 3-day passes and set about exploring the ruins. They’re absolutely incredible.

Though the area is collectively referred to as Angkor Wat, that name actually describes just one of the temple complexes. Other notable ruins, often miles and miles apart from one another, are Bayon and Ta Prohm. The temples, taken together, represent the remains of the Khmer empire, which lasted from the 9th to the 12th century. Angkor Wat is called the “largest religious complex in the world”; the temples are old and decaying and yet, in their own mysterious way, still seem alive. (“Tomb Raider,” starring Angelina Jolie, was filmed there. Indeed, the place seems like it’d be the ideal location for an “Indiana Jones” film.) Photos, as is so often the case, don’t adequately convey the experience of seeing the place in person.

For me, the two most incredible aspects of the area are:

1) The fact that you can walk in and through and on the temples; you can touch the intricate carvings made hundreds of years ago, and if you wanted, you could even pick up and walk away with some of the many crumbling stones that litter the site.

2) The beauty of these ancient temples stands in stark relief to the horror of the Khmer Rouge regime, which only expired a little over 20 years ago. My journal entries from our time in Cambodia, in abridged format, read something like this: “Phnom Penh/killing fields: blood and guts and teeth and bones and depravity. Angkor Wat: grand achievement and sublimity.” These two stretches of Cambodian history represent the two extremes of human accomplishment.

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