The Sun and the Spires: Angkor Wat (Day 8)

It turns out that if you have one morning in Angkor, the thing to do is to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. So Thoean picked me up at 5[1] and I staked out a spot. I’m sure that when someone says ‘the sunrise over Angkor Wat’ it sounds like a lovely, peaceful, meditative event, in a remote Asian wilderness…which I’m sure it could be…except it is an event you get to share shoulder to shoulder with literally thousands of other people.

Because of the sunrise crowd, my book suggested catching sunrise somewhere else or even skipping it and spending the 5:30-6:30 hour in one of the popular places (e.g. Ta Prohm) that you’d like to experience in a little solitude while everyone else in the park is congregated at the sunrise locations. I was tempted to do this. But, in general, I have learned that a brief trip does not afford the luxury of dodging ‘the standard tourist stuff.’ If you try to get too cute with a 30 hour visit (to ‘miss the crowds’) you end up with a second tier experience[2] missing some of the reasons the place is worth visiting. And the sunrise was remarkable.

And the crowd itself was fascinating. It was as if 2000 people decided simultaneously when the sunrise was over…which is an interesting sociological trick for a phenomenon as continuous as a hazy sunrise.

Angkor Wat itself was structurally underwhelming after the Bayon temple in Ankor Tom.[3] It is much more impressive from a distance. It is an impressive feat of ancient architecture but aesthetically it the structure paled in comparison to the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom (from yesterday). Yet, I was there for almost three hours. Because the really impressive part of Angkor Wat, besides the sunset and the iconic profile, are the engraved murals that adorn the complete circumference (6 football fields).

I was pretty taken with the art. I acquired a guide book to walk me through all 600m of relief carvings around Angkor Wat. I am writing pieces for my main blog on two of these carvings.[4]

And that I after visited a couple of the smaller temples[5] before making my final stop, including one with the most quietly dramatic entrance I encountered…

And a really interesting one that used to be in the middle of a vast reservoir. The reservoir is dry and you can drive up to it now, but it must have been quite a site totally surrounded by water.

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[1] Finally acclimated, this was the first morning I wasn’t already awake at 4:30.

[2] This is one of my problems with a lot of guides. The authors are so in love with these places that they have learned to love the little nuances of minor artifacts and the value of a quiet moment stolen in an understated corner of their favorite region. But in the months or years they have spent there, they have lost track of what it takes to optimize the experience of someone who has kids an home and can only spare a couple dozen hours to see the very best.

[3] It is older.

[4] Here’s the gist: 1) One of the carvings showed a clear three-part (heaven/earth/hell) cosmology...

...with detailed, creative torments going on in hell and literally nothing interesting going on in heaven. 

 I am primarily interested in how this depiction of (what appears to be decidedly eccentric) Hindu eschatology tracks almost identically with Christian contemporaries like Dante and Michelangelo and how that informs Christianity’s medieval move away from what I think is a two-part eschatology. 2) I want to quantify the biodiversity (both actual and mythical) of chaotic, pre-creation ‘sea of milk’ from the depiction of the Hindu creation story.

Narratives of War and Daily Life

In some ways, the coy smiles of the 200 some odd Buddha’s , criss crossing Angkor Tom’s spires in Cartesian precision across the 4 cardinal dimensions, have the same allure of the Mona Lisa’s famous expression. As I said in Interlude 2, they preside over forgotten stories. The know secrets that they will not tell. If you close your eyes and try to reconstruct a city of nearly a million people on these grounds…a Rome built into a jungle…you can only begin to imagine the scene let alone the story.

But this is part of what makes the Khumer ruins so special. The wall carvings (called bass reliefs) record stills of the content those stories may have actually contained.

This is why, after my experience with the murals at Angkor Wat (particularly the South East sections and their story of beginning and end…creation and destiny), I cut short the standard circuit of ‘minor temples’ to go back and returned to Angkor Tom[1] at the end of the day to add narrative to the pictures I had stared at with limited recognition the day before. The Baylon temple at Angkor Tom (the one with all the heads on the spires) boasts more footage of murals than Angkor Wat. There are some of lesser quality that surround the structure itself and tell many of the standard religious narratives that became familiar in the region’s iconography, but the most interesting ones told the story of Khumer warfare and daily life (often juxtaposed vertically on the same wall to create the narrative effect that daily life continued unaware of the heroism and courage required to maintain it.

And this, in my opinion, is part of the ‘greatness’ of these artifacts. They humanize their great monuments with the stories of their people, both ordinary and extraordinary. And carefully ‘reading’[2] these stories seemed like a fitting way to close my visit to this great an quiet (if not entirely silent) city.

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[1] And sometimes you have to divert from the standard tourist itinerary once your recognize a richness that tends to be missed. My basic advice if you have limited time at Angkor, spend more time at a few rather than trying to whirlwind them all.

[2] I used Freeman and Jacques “Ancient Angkor” to walk panel by panel through the reliefs, trying to pick out the images they highlighted like a sort of treasure hunt, and once I knew what I was looking at, trying to find my own. This little book probably enhanced the overall experience 30-50%.

Random Pictures

To wrap things up, here are a few random pictures that I wanted to include, but didn’t fit anywhere else.

Day 0: Chasing the Sun Survival guide to the 36 hour day

For the second month in a row[1], and the second time in my life, I find myself in South East Asia.  After the standard 24 hr flight in which the sun did not set  I landed in Phnom Pen Saturday around midnight.  I have taken these 24 hr double digit time zone change flights enough times to have a few rules:

1.     Try to go to sleep 1 hr after dinner.  It is tempting to do a lot of work or watch a couple movies, since it is around 4:00 pm by the time you should be going to bed (and the sun will never set on the whole trip), but if you are going to get 6 hours of sleep, you need to force it.

2.     Try to get a flight that gets in in the evening.  It is terrible to get in at like 10am and try to gut it through the day.  If you get in at night, you can just crash and you have a good start to kicking the jet lag.

3.     Don’t get old.  Nothing has deteriorated with age more than my ability to bounce back from sleeplessness.

I am teaching a river modeling class for the Mekong River Commission with my college Cam and my boss Jeff.  I’ll have more to say about that later.  For now, it’s worth noting that we traveled on Jeff’s birthday, which is kind of cool, because he had a 36 hour birthday, but is kind of lame because he spent it on a plane.

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 [1]I did a brief post on last month’s trip to Bangkok.