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Expectations and I have a rocky relationship. I am a wishful thinker, an eternal optimist, and an unreasonable believer that everything is going to go my way. I’ve tried, really and truly tried, to tamp down my travel hopes and dreams because I’ve learned the hard way that a thick blanket of fog can get stuck over Mt. Fitzroy the whole time you’re there, a week of rain might materialize at a Mexican beach, and a heavy snowfall on a trail in Bhutan can and will cancel a trek that can probably never be rebooked. So, when things not only follow my scripted expectations, but even exceed them, I am a pretty happy traveler. Cambodia as a whole, and the Angkor complex in particular, can be happily filed in this category.

I have spent at least the last decade pining to go to Cambodia. During that time, I went plenty of other places, but I kept pushing this one down the list because I wanted to combine it with its neighboring countries since that is a very long trip for me. So many of my blogging friends have been there, and all I could do was read and dream. My son went years ago, and I was pretty jealous. Then my sister who rarely travels managed to get there, and I was even more envious. Finally, we booked a long, painstakingly planned, independent trip to the region in February/March of 2020. You know what happened to that attempt.

We rebooked for that November (this Covid thing wasn’t going to last that long, right?) and watched that itinerary blow up as well. I tried for the spring of ’21, then the fall, then twice again in 2022, but every time we tried to wedge a 3-4 week outing into our schedules, it just wouldn’t fit. Knowing that most of the conflicts came from his calendar, my husband finally suggested I find a small group and take the trip myself. I needed no extensive coaxing and was booked a few months hence within days of our conversation. Sorry, honey!

So there I was, finally in Siem Reap, Cambodia, getting ready to see the largest religious structure in the world. We would also spend days covering the vast overall complex of Angkor, the capital city of the Khmer empire, a site which many researchers believe was the largest pre-industrial city in the world. Sprawling over nearly 400 square miles (1000 square kilometers), Angkor had an estimated population of up to a million people in its heyday, the 9th to 15th centuries.

We started with Ta Prohm, the temple made famous by the Tomb Raider movies (which I have never seen) but so striking in its own right that it hardly needed a bunch of Angelina Jolie movies to recommend it!

When the Angkor temples were found and slowly rebuilt, Ta Prohm was left more untouched than others, apparently because it was one of the most imposing temples in the ancient city and also because it had melded with the jungle in a particularly picturesque way – man’s creation and nature intertwined to glorious effect. As our first stop of the morning and introduction to Angkor, Ta Prohm was a big winner, eliciting dozens of photos and much energetic roaming about the grounds.

We moved on to the city of Angkor Thom (the largest of all sites within Angkor) and Bayon, the grand temple at its exact center. With 216 smiling Buddha faces carved into its towers, and an incredible three-tiered bas-relief that depicted scenes of everyday life and historic events, Bayon was captivating.

The bas-relief alone might have kept me there for days (we covered only the exterior galleries; these were mirrored by a set of interior carvings), but by the end of this site tour, at the peak of mid-day, we were huddling behind every column we could find, in search of any thin strip of shade in the 100-degree (38 C) heat and stifling humidity.

There were so many stories in the bas-relief that I couldn’t begin to photograph or memorize many. A woman giving birth, a cockfight, kings carried on elephants, battles between Khmers and Chams; all were realistically carved into the stone and have survived centuries of weather and neglect to tell the stories of the Khmer people. Many are quite funny or charmingly quotidian: a woman holding a turtle so that it bites the man in front of her, a seller’s fingers tipping a scale to cheat the buyer, scenes from a beauty parlor, the tweezing of chin hairs, etc.

Angkor Wat itself was, as anticipated, the highlight for me. It was followed by a number of delightful surprises, but still, this monumental structure and its grounds are a tourist hotspot for a reason. Despite its scale and popularity, there was something very quiet and peaceful about Angkor Wat, perhaps because we visited in the late afternoon as the sun hit the edifice at a slant and most of the visiting hordes had left for the day. Even in its busiest areas, though, the temple exudes a quiet spirituality that even the non-religious can appreciate.

We approached over a vast moat that surrounds the temple and reflects its western face, an anomaly among Khmer temples, which mostly face east. Like Bayon, Angkor Wat features a long wall of bas-reliefs, in this case spanning 800 meters of wall space (nearly half a mile!) and centuries of history. Here, they are more deeply etched, and with a bit more shade in which to view them, we were able to study the carvings at leisure.

As we stepped inside, one of my favorite aspects of the site appeared – a stack of partially sunny doorways – and to my delight, similar scenes were repeated over and over throughout the first and second floors of the temple.

At one point, our guide pointed out a different colored stone in the floor and laid his phone’s compass down to show us that the temple was centered at exactly 0 degrees north; how did they calculate that and build from there with absolute symmetry over 1000 years ago? I’m a sucker for this kind of evidence of ancient expertise.

On the second floor, there was a large plaza from which Angkor Wat’s five iconic towers rise, all with tiny, vertiginously steep stairs leading to their tops. One set was for the king only (and he was carried up them); on a different set, some metal steps had been added on the corner of another tower so we peons could climb to the third floor ourselves. A few of us scrambled up and were rewarded with golden hour views of the lower floors and the grounds.

Our final day in Angkor began with a tour of Banteay Srei, also known as the pink temple because of the red sandstone used to build it.

The name translates as “citadel of the women;” though the origins of the name are unknown, theories include the more petite dimensions of the structures, the intricacy of the bas-relief carvings, and the existence of many female deities carved into the rock walls.

Because it is so small with such immaculate handiwork, Banteay Srei is a visitor favorite, a tiny gem in the lineup of temples at Angkor.

We continued on to Banteay Samre. Also much smaller than the places we had seen the day before, this site featured a single tower reminiscent of the ones at Angkor Wat and the same rosy limestone used at Banteay Srei.

Although I was almost at max temple absorption by this time, we undertook one last outing, to Preah Khan in the afternoon. Here we observed even more clearly the flip-flopping of religions that occurred at many of the sites, first Hindu, then Buddhist, back to Hindu, and Buddhist again.

Preah Khan was the least restored temple we saw, and that in itself was revelatory, putting into perspective much that we had seen in the days before. I love puzzles, but when I contemplated the jumbled heaps of giant stones inside and outside the tree-encircled outer walls, I could hardly imagine the jigsaw skills that would be needed to recreate even this one temple, let alone the assortment of reconstructed temples we had visited in our time in Cambodia.

Beyond the Khmer treasures, Cambodia was also my favorite stop in the region. The people were exceptionally kind and gentle, and we were able to talk with several individuals whose lives had been terribly torn apart by the Khmer Rouge in the time of the killing fields. The grace of these survivors, their ongoing ability to find joy, and their pride in what their country has done to restore itself in ways far beyond ancient ruins were powerful and humbling. I am so grateful that I had a chance to meet them and see a small bit of their past and present lives.