Angkor Whaaaaat?

Day 5 - Siem Reap

With the water festival finished we has one more place to visit in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is an indisputable wonder of the world and the largest religious monument ever constructed. It sits within a temple complex covering 400km², the scale of which is impossible to adequately describe. Its towers seem to rise organically from the ground, the stone flowering from the earth into wonderfully symmetric form. Only modern capitalism and totalitarian hubris seem to inspire similar architectural endeavour as the gods did in the past. I don't necessarily agree with any of those ideologies and their human cost but religion's diminished power permits me a less coloured appreciation of its monuments. In the stone of Angkor Wat you see reflected the same desire for, and defiant belief in, permanence that runs through our species. I see it in the chiselled signage above the entrance to long dead banks and businesses in the City of London. The owners thought the gilded lobbies would throng with customers far into the future but could not have imagined those same customers conducting the same business in the same building only they are in their boutique flat tapping at a small, black device the size of a paying in book.
The scale of Angkor demands a quicker way of getting around than one's own feet. We hired electric scooters which were great fun due, in no small part, to the fact that my opportunity to operate a motor vehicle is sadly limited in so many countries. Frantic shouting and waving in my wing mirror indicated that I'd rode straight through the ticket checkpoint into the Angkor area. I was just behaving as the locals do which is usually a a good way to approach things. That people still live next to these temples and send their children to school in the shadow of 900 year old works of genius is an odd sight to say the least. It must give them a relationship with their country's past quite different from the one you would have with the pages of a history book. The things the Khmer people built here stand comparison with anything built in Europe in the 12th century and yet the outsized economic and cultural dominance of the west in the centuries after seems aptly represented in the main strip of bars and restaurants in Siem Reap being called 'Pub Street'. Its the novelty of the 'orient' alongside familiar comforts. The multitudinous guides that await you at the temples are also well versed in the desires of tourists. They deliver impressively identical tours (on their 'day off' from being a site security guard) instructing people exactly where to stand to get exactly the same picture they saw in the guidebook. I've waxed lyrical on the subject before so won't do so again except to say that Angkor is one of those places whose beauty rises above the commoditised experiences being sold around it.