Angkor Temples
62 images Created 23 Jan 2010
Experiencing Angkor takes time. I spent nearly two weeks at it, which was not really enough to see and do everything within a day's excursion from Siem Reap. I got around conveniently and pleasantly by tuktuk. The Angkor Archaeological Park, managed by the APSARA Authority of Cambodia, is an enormous range (up to 1000 km square) of forest and field in which 1,000 temples, moats, and earthworks are found, dating from the 9th to 14th centuries AD. The core monuments are the ancient Khmer city of Angkor Thom, abandoned during the 15th century, and the enormous temple of Angkor Wat built by Suryavarman II in the 12th century. While European kings and bishops were building Romanesque and Gothic abbeys and cathedrals filled with images of saints, Khmer kings piled up huge boulders on top of one another to replicate the sacred Mount Meru of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology and filled them with images of Apsaras and Devatas. In trying to comprehend the vastness, I concentrated on the details.