Cambodia Continued

After one very full day of many many temples, I was a little bit worried that I would get templed out.  Fortunately, my worries were unfounded, because the Angkor temples turned out to be fabulously diverse!  No temple sunrises for us on Day 2, but we did get up at a sufficiently bright and early 6 am to get on our way.  This day took us farther afield, heading towards the far-off but reputed-to-be-impressive Banteay Srei.  We took a brief and rather sleepy stop at another temple called Pre Rup on the way:

And then we were at Banteay Srei!  Banteay Srei is built entirely out of stunning red rock, which was a sharp contrast from the gray temples of the day before.  Its intricate carvings seemed to be quite well preserved, and there were few tourists.  We like.

Awesome carvings!

Monkey guards!

Peekaboo

This picture is dedicated to Shana "Preserve Cultural Relics" Fung:

We escaped just as a giant group of Chinese tourists in matching hats arrived...

After seeing Banteay Srei, we stopped at the land mine museum, a small establishment run by a man named Aki Ra.  Aki Ra was conscripted as a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge, where he planted numerous land mines.  Later in life, he became a one-man force to rid Cambodia of land mines.  Using the most decidedly unfancy of equipment, he singlehandedly removed thousands of land mines in the Cambodian countryside, created the land mine museum, and took in a number of children who had been victims of land mine accidents.  Pretty much, this guy is the man.  Unfortunately, he has his work cut out for him: although highly populated areas are now quite safe, many areas of rural Cambodia still haven't been cleared of land mines.

Moving on from the museum, we hopped back in the tuk-tuk and took off, only to be stopped shortly thereafter by a flat tire.  It didn't take long to fix though, and I am pretty sure the fix cost our tuk-tuk driver 25 or 50 cents total.  As cheap as things were for us in Cambodia, they are definitely even cheaper for Cambodians!

Fixed up, it was time to head off to Eastern Mebon:

And Ta Som:

And Neak Pean, a dry reservoir.  They say that the reason the Angkor Empire expanded so far was their efficient water management system, and the reason for its collapse was expanding too far.  Sounds pretty plausible to me, and these guys definitely had a lot of empty reservoirs hanging around:

At the next temple, Preah Khan, we had a longish road up to walk up to the temple.  Just like at any other one of these temples, we were immediately assailed by small adorable Cambodian children trying to sell us trinkets.  These children were persistent enough that they succeeded in distracting me so much that I walked straight into a tree branch.  With my eye.  And it was a prickery branch, too!  Bleeding copiously from my eyelid, I fished around in my bag to find something to put on my wound.  Amazingly, the children didn't miss a beat, and kept up their bracelet-selling spiel like nothing had ever happened.  An amused Vicky caught the moment on film:

Once the eyelid-bleeding was under control, Preah Khan turned out to be a really lovely place, with interesting Grecian-looking structures that were unlike anything we had seen at the other temples:

Also, super-huge trees never stop being awesome

We finished all of our templing for the day by early afternoon, leaving plenty of time for crucial activities like lunch and napping.  That night, on the recommendation of our adorable tuk-tuk driver Chaa, we went to a restaurant where they had an apsara dancing show during dinner.  Apsaras are celestial dancers, and are heavily featured in temple carvings.  Our apsaras seemed to be less of celestial beings and more of bored local teenagers, but it was interesting to watch anyway.

Unrelated to anything but nonetheless intriguing: we stopped at a little grocery store on our way home and discovered a product entitled "Instant Pink Nipple."  Apparently it is a product for people who feel that their nipples are too dark and would like to make them pinker?  Up to this point, I was unaware that there was much demand for such a product, but it exists, so I guess there must be...

(we got yelled at when we tried to take pictures, so I only have indistinct ones)

We still had one more day on our entrance pass to Angkor, so the next morning we grooved on out to the Roluos group of temples, which are older and smaller and not so frequented by tourists.

Preah Ko:

On the way up to the temple of Bakong, we noticed that men were lining the streets with colored flags, and there were strings of colored cloth hanging all along the road.  As we were wondering why, a group of boys came through with a wagon carrying a large box.  It was a funeral procession.

The temple itself:

When we emerged from Bakong, we found Chaa waiting for us with corn on the cob!  Chaa was a really sweet guy, which definitely improved our Angkor Wat experience a lot, because we spent a pretty large amount of time with him every day.

After seeing the temple of Lolei (so small and unremarkable that I don't even have any pictures), we headed back into town.  Interesting sight on the way: a couple of men carrying huge live pigs on the backs of their motorcycles!  They were strapped on face-up, one pig per motorcycle, and were so remarkably docile that at first I thought they must be dead.  Sadly we just caught a glimpse of it while we were moving on the road, and they had sped off before either of us could pull out a camera.

That afternoon, done with temples, Chaa took-took us to visit Artisans d'Angkor, an artisan cooperative where local people learn different artistic trades.  We watched some sculptors and wood-carvers, browsed around their store, and then caught the bus off to their silk farm, where they produce, spin, and weave their own silk.

No longer in need of a tuk-tuk, it was time to say goodbye to our pal Chaa :(

It was really interesting to see silk go from the initial raw substance to fine, colorful threads being woven together on a loom:

Soooo shiny!  And so expensive...

That evening, we bought random street foods composed of unknown substances (one of them looked like a muffin: it was not.) and poked around the local market, but mostly we slept, because the next morning we had to get up early to try to catch the bus back to Phnom Penh!