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.
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