Woman Hollerin': Beginning at the End

Forget for a moment that Cambodia has been continuously populated since the building of the city of Angkor Thom and the various temples that comprise the Angkor complex in the 10th century.

Now, imagine yourself a French naturalist searching for species of plants and animals as yet unknown to Europeans in the 19th century. Your Cambodian guides are slicing through the jungle underbrush on a hill. You look up and see an incredible sight: a huge stone building rising from the treetops in the distance.

Never mind that Cambodian monks have been tending the temple of Angkor Wat throughout the centuries and keeping the vines and trees of the tropical forest from taking over the premises, the colonial world labels the discovery YOURS.

Today's world traveler need not be anywhere near as intrepid as those first French explorers who found Cambodia's secret. My friend Ellie and I, for example, spent five wonderful days in Siem Reap exploring the temples of Angkor Wat and the Bayon and the city of Angkor Thom.

Instead of a jungle emergence, we crossed a causway to Angkor Wat like the thousands of other tourists who visit the site each year. No need for machetes.
No one will mistakenly think that we discovered these temples, but we are certainly educating a lot of people about them.

Our visit to Angkor came at the end of an amazing trip in Vietnam, but after seeing these temples, I felt like I'd seen Halong Bay, Hoi An and the squid boats of Danang in a long-ago lifetime.

I can't do justice to the experience in one post, so as I reflect on my mind-blowing adventure, I predict that I'll be coming back again and again to the bas reliefs of Angkor Wat and the Bayon. Both temples have facilitated reverence for Hindu gods and the Buddha, according to the current king's beliefs. The reliefs combine secular and sacred history, beginning with the creation of the world and its animal and human species out of the churning milk sea through the battles among the Khmer and their neighbors in the ancient world.

Thank you to the monks who cared for the temples. Thank you to those who continue to worship in and around Angkor. Thank you to the monks who, like me, were touring the temples to learn. I apologize for invading your privacy at the sites, but the saffron robes are irresistible. I hope you will view the photos as part of my homage to the spirits who built, maintain and populate the temples.