Bunny Vs. Boonies - Cambodia

3,000 More Temples...

What I didn’t know before this trip is that Angkor Wat was just the government center of the region. As I mentioned in the previous post, there are over 3,000 more temples – and that’s just the ones that survived and we know about.

No, we didn’t go to all of them, but it sure felt like it. We got to see the ones that have giant, Omec-like faces carved into them. Some temples were restored to almost new looking quality, some were left to look as they were when they were discovered. We even got to walk around the temple they used for the rustic temple scenes in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Rather than give you a long list of GPS coordinates and boring details, I’ll just let you see the pics since that’s all you’ll be looking for anyway.

These are actually some of the easier stairs we had to climb.

They still use these ancient doorways today.

The famous faces that remind me of the Omecs in South America

Do I look like them?

This giant tree is growing out of the temple roof.

This is the inside of the temple and the roots of that giant tree above.

These ruins are ruined.

A doorway made more famous when Laura Croft ran through them in the Tomb Raider movie.

I was paid $10/hour to hold this up. Not worth it…

No one is sure exactly how these ancient people knew about dinosaurs, but that is a stegosaurus if I ever saw one.

Just so you know, this pose hurts more that you’d think. I won’t be quitting my day job.

Angkor Wat...

N 13 deg 24.749
E 103 deg 51.963

Angkor Wat

This first of the Seven Man-made Wonders of the World that I have been to. Way cool. Words cannot express the way you feel walking around a temple that is the epicenter of a lost metropolis the size of Los Angeles. Yeah, I’m not making that up. I always thought that the Angkor Wat temple was the whole lot of it. There are actually about 3,000 temples around a 400 Km2 area. “Angkor” means “City” or “Government” depending on which tour guide you ask. “Wat” means “Temple.” So this is the main temple at the center of the government and the city. Hence; the most famous. Naturally, the main temple was our first stop.

Monks walking around

The closer you get the more you notice the detailed carvings. I didn’t realize how much of every surface has something on it. Every wall on every end is covered with stories. Here is just one wall and the carvings go on forever.

The detailed carvings cover nearly every surface you will find anywhere in the temple (sans flooring).

The temple is made of sandstone. A poor choice if you are going for longevity. Well, to be fair, this one lasted a while, but many parts are wearing away. In addition, tourists have touched so many carvings that they are starting to fade. The places touched most commonly are worn shiny. Which is great, until any water gets on them, and then they fall apart easier because of the acids, oils and whatnot we leave behind.

I wonder what part of this carving people touch the most. Perverts.

As you come in from the walkways through thousands-year-old door frames into the center courtyard your jaw instinctively drops.



Being off season, there were less tourists to contend with, but they still instinctively flocked precisely in front of all the good shots. Once the rain came, they cleared right out making it open for pictures.



Even just the center Angkor Wat temple is so large that you’ll get tired walking around. There are stones all around to take a seat on. But you feel a bit guilty when you realize these are also carved ruins.

The Korean tourists touched everything and crawled all over places that signs asked them not to. Finally, a race of tourists that make Americans look good.

As impressive as it is, there is only so long you can walk around and look at it. Time came for us to leave. We knew fully well that we’d be back the next day to see some of the other 3,000 temples in the area, but I still could not stop looking back at Angkor Wat constantly as we walked away. I have seen for myself now why this is one of the Seven Man-made Wonders of the World. Six more to go…

The Killing Fields...

N 11 deg 29.070
E 104 deg 54.085

Today was somber. It was overcast with scattered showers. But also, genocide with scattered victims.

We woke early to board a flight to Cambodia and bid Thailand farewell. We arrived in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. The cloudy sky and prevailing wind let the air feel surprisingly cool. In order to work around the local siesta time, we headed straight to the first stop on our tour, the Killing Fields.

I studied briefly about the Pol Pot rebellion and the Khmer Rouge killings. But it wasn’t until this stop that I really gained an understanding of what it all meant. As we walked up to the entrance, we were greeted with a tall tower. It had about 8 layers, each stacked with skulls pulled out of the mass graves in these killing fields.





We walked around the gruesome grounds. We came to many dug-up holes in the ground, now grown over with weeds. Each was a mass grave. It looked like there must have been 4 dozen in this small area no greater than a quarter acre. Some had fences around them with signs explaining what made them different than the others.

“Mass grave of more than 100 victims children and women whose majority were naked”

One tree is famous. The guards would take small children by the feet and swing them like baseball bats into the trees until they died.

“Killing tree against which executioners beat children”

At this point I noticed I saw lots of clothes along the ground. The guide casually told me that was the clothes of the people who were buried. I was shocked. There were parts where piles of clothes were right on the top of the ground. At first I was skeptical. As I continued walking I saw more and more, all of which looked as if it was half buried and weathered. It was sobering to know that this massacre was recent enough that the cloth was in good enough condition I could see the striped patterns on a man’s shirt.

Clothes that comes up from the graves when they flood with rain water

N 11 deg 32.975
E 104 deg 55.064

Following that, we silently sat in the van as we were taken to Security 21 (S-21). That is the most famous torture prison the Khmer Rouge used. S-21 was a high school that was converted to a veritable Auschwitz. In some places, the bullet holes looked fresh and the blood still had not been completely removed.

Typical Cell

There were also pictures of the people involved. The majority of the killing was done not by men, but rather children. Boys as young as 13 and often not older than 18 would be given guns, but were instructed to use sticks and cheaper, more painful methods of killing. They did so gladly.

The killers

And the victims ranged from newborns, as you saw above with the tree, to the elderly. Although the educated and skilled were the most targeted, no one was safe from this tyranny.

Our tour guide survived this mess. His dad was in support of the Khmer Rouge when great promises were offered. When the Khmer Rouge came to power there were parties in the streets. Suddenly, the soldiers started firing on the crowd and evacuated the entire capital city. Our guide’s father told the family not to worry, that this was his party and there was a misunderstanding. He went out to greet the soldiers. They turned and nearly shot him. The father tried to speak to the children with guns, but it was clear he was going to get nowhere except a grave if he persisted. He came back inside, looked as his family and told them to grab as much rice as they could. “Something is wrong. Everything has changed. We must leave.”

They left to a remote village and although they were successful and educated people, masqueraded as peasants. That saved their lives. They worked as many as 12 hours a day as slaves but kept their heads down and survived. Our guide was not emotional about the experience, but you could tell it forever changed him.

I have been to not one, but two of the World War II Nazi prison camps. Both were also sad and loathsome places. But the freshness and reality of this was more than I could have expected.

While I could never defend the actions of Hitler, I can somewhat understand him. He had goals. He wanted to perfect his master race of fellow Germans. He felt Jews (and others) who were threats were to be killed, or even used as slave labor or experimental fodder. While vile none the less, one could make sense of his evil plotting. But this was beyond reason. This was Cambodians killing Cambodians. There was no plan here. There was no goal. To this day no one knows what, if anything, Pol Pot and his lot were ultimately hoping to accomplish. 1.7 million people died directly from this regime, and incidental deaths total 3.5 million. Nearly half of the entire country was wiped out as a result and we are only left to scratch our heads and wonder, “Why?”

I think the part that affected me the most were the portraits. Many records were taken of both the victims and the assailants. I looked into the eyes of the unfortunate captives. I found myself lost in a sea of faces; peering into my soul through the photographs and, indeed, from beyond the grave. Faces that I will never forget.