We visited Cambodia several years ago, when the temples of Angkor were unknown to most of tourists. Siem Reap, the starting point for the exploration of the archaeological site was then a small town that offered almost nothing: just a covered market and some nice restaurants with exorbitant prices. The only evening activity was the buffet dinner at one of the few nice restaurants, where you can taste the Cambodian cuisine and see a traditional Apsara dance performance. We know that Siem Reap is no longer the same now: we have been told it is now crowded with hotels, modern restaurants, music and nightlife.
What surely remains unchanged is the undisputed beauty of the Angkor temples.
Angkor is the most important archaeological site of Cambodia that hosted the capital of the Khmer Empire between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. The great city and its temples had remained largely hidden by vegetation until the second half of the nineteenth century, when reports of mostly French explorations – but also English and US – brought to the general public the myth of the “lost city in the jungle” that fascinated generations of Europeans. Most of the best known and most visited temples are concentrated in an area of about 15 km x 6.5 km north of Siem Reap, but the total area definable as Angkor is much larger. The most visited ones have been cleared of vegetation and largely rebuilt.
You can choose different transportation to reach and visit the temples: car, tuk-tuk or bike. We selected the third option. The temples are located 6 km from Siem Reap and I still remember that I competed with Ale to see who could pedal faster. At a certain point, I couldn’t see him anymore: he cleverly placed himself behind me to take advantage of the “contrail”. All jokes aside, those three days were splendid. The site was very quiet and riding our bikes among those ruins was an extraordinary experience. The landscape is fantastic in the truest sense of the word: temples immersed in dense vegetation and partly devoured by the tree roots, monkeys jumping from one branch to another. Everything leads back to an enchanted and surreal world where you can wonder to be an explorer.
The best-known temple is Angkor Wat, which is considered as the largest religious building in the world. The Bayon temple is as good as the aforementioned one, with its 200 stone faces that look in every direction.
The most incredible temple is undoubtedly Ta Prohm: a mysterious place where the mystical charm of the East is combined with the primordial nature. Its crumbling walls merge in a slow embrace with intricate systems of roots, almost as if to demonstrate the supremacy of nature over man.
Literally swallowed by the jungle, Ta Prohm is one of the few Angkor temples that probably represents the conditions in which the site appeared to European explorers who first came across it. The temple has been used several times as movies set, first of all Tomb Rider.
After two days and several kilometers covered by bike, we spent the third day exploring the temple of Bakong. It is the first sandstone temple-mountain built by the kings of the Khmer Empire in Angkor, about 13 km from Siem Reap, in an area currently called Roluos.
At that time, the main site of Angkor was semi-unknown, and when we visited Bakong we were the only people around…
