Temples of Angkor

The long weekend plan (Friday through Monday)
Our host organization ABV sponsored a long weekend trip that is just coming to an end. We left Friday morning to go to the city Siem Reap, roughly 300km northwest of Phnom Penh. In Siem Reap are the temples of Angkor - a really impressive accumulation of Buddhist and Hindu temples.
But first to the trip down there. We again found ourselves in a similar "Mercedes" van...

The interesting part about all these "Mercedes" is that they have Mitsubishi engines and the car itself is built by a company called "SsangYong" in Korea... not much Mercedes there at all....

Anyway... our first stop was at a silk farm and weaving business, run by "Bud" - an old Vietnam war veteran who decided to return back to this region to make up for some of the damages the US has caused here. He now hires underprivileged women to learn to weave and to generate their own income - and mostly to develop a sense of pride in themselves and their work. Bud doesn't actually produce the silk from the silk worms himself any more, but he does keep around a population of them for show and tell.
It all starts with a gigantic fleet of silk worms... very hungry little worms that eat a ton of mulberry bush leaves...

After a few days of good dining, these worms spin themselves into a cocoon made of - exactly.... a tiny silk fiber. It is a single fiber, that is roughly 600 meters long.

The next step is then to soak these cocoons in warm water, find the end of the fiber - and then somewhere around 15 or so fibers get spun together to make a thread of silk.

This place is off course not the cheapest place to buy silk scarves - but the amazing colors, and the authenticity of the work more than make up for it... so I did buy a "surprise" gift for my wife. When I brought the scarve through the weaving facility - it took the employees roughly 0.5 seconds to identify the creator of the scarve - the girl in the picture below.

The next short stop was a stretch along the main road where the stone masons work... creating hundreds of small, medium and large masterpieces... here is one of the larger ones they are working on... (I am not bringing that one home)

In Siem Reap
ok - now we are now down in Siem Reap - staying in the hotel of the cousin of the wive of... you get the story. The city is fairly small, but hosts roughly 2 million tourists a year - so it is rather busy. In order to understand the temples of Angkor - I can't spare you a little bit of history.
From roughly 900-1200 AD, the Khmer Empire dominated Indochina (Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos), as well as Thailand and a few other countries down here. It was a highly developed society, with both Buddhist and Hindu roots. Interestingly the religion swapped back and forth as kings came and went, such that one portion of the temples are dominated by Buddha figures, and the others by the Hindu gods. Today Cambodia is >90% Buddhist.
The 2 most famous temples are Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm (the "Jungle Temple"). Angkor Wat was constructed as a Hindu temple and dedicated to the god Wishnu. It is the biggest religious building in the world, and this temple is what every tourist would recognize as the symbol of Cambodia. The walls on all levels feature endless stories carved into the rocks in amazing detail.

After the Khmer empire fell apart, almost all of the temples here had been abandoned and swallowed by the jungles - they were then re-discovered around 1860, and de-jungled not till fairly recently. There is just one temple that was left in the wild state that it was found in and made accessible to tourists... some really impressive trees towering over the "Jungle Temple". (This is our IBM team in the foreground.)

On Sunday our host (the cousin of the wive of....) brought us to a flooding village and a floating village. Unfortunately I'll have to bore you again with some background knowledge to get the concept of these villages.
Cambodia has a rainy season and a dry season. Right now is the early part of the rainy season. There are 2 major rivers that merge here in Phnom Penh. One is the Mekong river, and the other one is the Tonle Sap - which is a lake as well as a river. During the dry season, both rivers join up and flow south to Vietnam. During the rainy season, the water level from the Mekong river increases so dramatically, that the smaller Tonle Sap river just gets pushed back - and the river reverses direction. Near Siem Reap is the Tonle Sap lake. During that rainy season (when all the water from the Mekong river gets pushed up the Tonle Sap river), the water level in the lake rises by up to 8 meters, and the lake grows to 6 times its "normal" size.
Since the water level rises so much - the houses in the fishing village (the flooding village) have to be built for it. During the peak of the flood, all roads, trees, etc disappear under water.
Road Side:

River Side

From here we took a little boat down the river to the edge of the Tonle Sap lake, where a floating village is anchored. It is truly amazing how an entire village with schools, grocery stores, and everything else can exist on the water... and travel up and down the river depending on the flood level.

Here is one of my favorite pictures from this trip... People here - especially kids - are amazingly beautiful and have such an innocent and un-consumed smile.

Lastly... just a short mention of the culinary highlights of the week... The menu featured a few new items:

• silk worms after the silk is spun off from the cocoon - taste like nuts
• frog legs - tastes exactly like chicken
• crickets (Heuschrecken) - also kind'a tastes like chicken

Enjoy the week... more at the end of the week...