Diary Entry
It was a special visit to the beautiful, yet terrifying, city of Phnom Penh, as well as to the memorial site of the horrific events during the Khmer Rouge regime. We flew by turboprop to Siem Reap, the connecting city to the temples of Angkor. The service on board was okay, but the food was even worse than on the last flight.
A middle-aged man sits next to me. I joke a bit about the food, and we start chatting. To my surprise, it turns out that he’s the hotel manager of our hotel in Siem Reap and is very familiar with Ian; they had already greeted each other at the airport. His name is Ha.
The baggage reclaim hall is the smallest I’ve ever seen. While at normal airports, items travel down a section of the hall on a conveyor belt, here they arrive almost directly inside the hall, and the security guards simply place the suitcases and bags on a bench and take them away from the passengers. A minibus takes us to the Freedom Hotel, the last hotel on my trip.
This is the final leg of my first, teenage journey through Indochina! I’m a little wistful, but full of anticipation, because there’s still something very special to see here!
Siem Reap is very beautiful, but clearly a tourist town. There are many construction sites where ever larger and more luxurious hotels are being built to prepare the town for a future tourist boom. But it is an absolutely clean little town.
Our hotel is also quite luxurious, compared to our previous hostels, and can probably only be compared to our hotel in Bangkok, which Glen and I notice, wallowing in nostalgia, on ours; where it all began.
We leave our luggage behind and head straight to the hotel restaurant. It’s on the ground floor and has two open sides. A delightful little waitress serves us our lunch. She’s pretty and friendly, and suddenly all the male members of the group are competing with each other for attention, something the girls don’t notice, especially Kevin, Glen, and I.
The girl introduces herself as Phila when I ask her name while paying. She also mentions that my friend Kevin forgot to pay when he left. I wish her a nice day and assure her I’ll send it back.
We meet in our minibus, which we’re about to use again. He’s stunned and storms out of the bus, thanking me for completely forgetting.
First, we have to go to an office at the temple complex to get photo-entry passes. It’s like a small toll booth. A photographer takes passport photos, we pull faces, and the guards just have to be able to recognize us.
After driving through the forest for a while, we stop and walk a bit through the jungle until we reach an ancient gate. This is the Ta Promh temple. It’s a large temple complex, located in the middle of the jungle and overgrown with trees and vines. A huge tree grows out of the first building we see, its roots gripping it tightly. From an archaeological perspective, these trees are both a blessing and a curse, for they hold the walls together and protect them from erosion by wind and weather. On the other hand, they also break a few walls and towers.
These trees are huge!
Wandering through the ruins becomes an adventure; trees grow from the rubble, strangler figs with roots as strong as tree trunks encircle the walls. There are hardly any tourists around, and you can sense the thirst for discovery of the early explorers; you feel like you’ve been transported into The Jungle Book or an Indiana Jones adventure. The dense jungle grows around the walls, continuing into the ruins. Between the roots, you can still see reliefs on the walls, old drawings of wars, and, in particular, the numerous dancers, meant to evoke the beauty of Khmer women. The women still perform the same movements that are still used in dances today in Southeast Asia.
The History of Ta Prohm
Ta Prohm is located about two kilometers northeast of Angkor Wat. The temple was built in the late 12th to early 13th century under King Jayavarman VII and was originally called “Rajavihara,” meaning “royal monastery.” Jayavarman VII dedicated the complex to his mother and consecrated it in 1186 to the Buddhist deity Prajnaparamita, the symbol of the “perfection of wisdom.”
Ta Prohm was once an important Buddhist monastery and university center. At its peak, over 12,000 people lived there, including many monks, and around 80,000 people from the surrounding villages were employed to maintain and care for the complex.
The temple is famous for its unique combination of architecture and nature: massive tree roots, especially of the Tetrameles nudiflora and strangler figs, overgrow the ruins and give Ta Prohm its mystical appearance.
Unlike other temples in Angkor, Ta Prohm was deliberately left in its semi-ruined state during restoration to preserve the striking fusion of jungle and stone. The temple also gained worldwide fame as a filming location for the movie “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.”
Source: Ta Prohm – Wikipedia, Wiki Voyage
I climb walls and over stones and take a short trip into the jungle surrounding the temple. On one side, there’s a small canal, where I’m particularly attacked by mosquitoes. There are large termite mounds. Many small frogs hop excitedly through the grass, just at the last moment diving for cover from my footsteps. Gigantic harvestmen hover over the forest floor. Here, too, there are still many remains of walls. I still keep the spot where I entered the forest in sight.
Many ants populate the ground, both tiny and ants the size of bees. A few of them also buzz around, as long as they aren’t wasps, which are black and brown with only a yellow stripe across their bodies and are significantly larger than bees or wasps, but not as big as hornets. A few colorful butterflies also float through the air.
The jungle is full of animals!
I feel like Indiana Jones in The Jungle Book!
Check out more of my juvenile trip through Indochina!
An old man sweeps the temple. Every day. No one knows why.
Suddenly I find myself caught in a spider web, which must be very large, as the trees are far apart. I panic for a moment and pull the invisible threads away from my body. Thankfully, there is no sign of a spider. I’m starting to feel uncomfortable, also because the mosquitoes won’t leave me alone and are slowly swarming over me. I follow the small stream back. But I have to stop again after climbing over a couple of termite mounds to take a shortcut, because a huge, fat millipede is crawling across the forest floor in front of me. I bend down and look at it more closely to take a photo. Later I remember that these animals have a deadly venom.
My companions are no longer there, leaving only Ian and Jane to take a few last photos of Ta Promh. I wander around this side of the temple complex a bit longer, looking for our friends with Jane. Then we return to Siem Reap and visit a school there. The next day, I’ll finally see the legendary Angkor Wat.
