A Vacation in Ruins!

Ok, Part I of a long blog post about my 2 week school holiday. Today is my last day of freedom before I return to the classroom tomorrow. I really prefer being a student to being a teacher, I find. Cross one potential career off the list. If only I knew what viable careers to put on the list rather than constantly crossing different ones off.

Before this vacation some stuff happened at school, like a big Teacher's Day celebration and an awesome Drama Club performance, but that's frankly not as interesting. I'll get to it later.

I spent the bulk of the vacation in Laos (another post in and of itself, I think). This blog post will be devoted to 3.5 days I spent at the beginning of my vacation in Siem Reap, Cambodia visiting the ruins at Angkor. Happily, I ran into a lovely ETA named Shannon on the plane and hung out with her for a day and a half. My other traveling companion was my dear Katie, who is an ideal companion for me because we both understand the importance of stopping for iced beverages, avoiding crowds at Angkor at all costs, and investing in $3-6 massages whenever possible. (I usually opted for the head massage, Katie for the feet--but it's those key differences that make any partnership viable, no?) I put the Angkor trip at the beginning of my itinerary because I was super excited about seeing the ruins, and I wanted to experience them absolutely fresh and bright-eyed rather than even slightly travel-worn.

The way most people see the ruins is to ride a tuk tuk around the complex all day. One of the most impressive things about Angkor is the sheer scale of the ruins combined with their intricate details. Ignorant me hadn't realized what a huge area the ruins are spread over. We tried to time our visits to avoid peak times when crowds would be at particularly popular sites (a feat mostly accomplished through Katie's clever index card with notes from Lonely Planet and consultation with our tight-lipped tuk tuk driver, Mon). As a result, we often had temples to ourselves or nearly so. You can get some of that wild feeling of discovery and excitement as you pull up to a temple where you have no idea what to expect and start scrambling over and through its crumbling rocks. This brings up a key point: If these ruins were in the US, they would probably be completely roped off and carefully-guarded and sterilized and stabilized and UN-FUN. Part of me felt guilty for climbing up nearly-vertical steps that were hundreds of years old and knowing that I was contributing to their gradual dismantlement. But another part of me thought that it was awesome that I'm alive now before the time when they inevitably get more roped off and protected. Is it better to preserve historical artifacts for an indefinite amount of time by keeping them at a safe remove from interaction with the public, or is it better to allow people a literally hands-on appreciation of history, even if it shortens the artifacts' lifespans? I've read plenty of things about looters and vacationers pillaging historic sites and doing irreparable damage and shaken my head dutifully as I read them. Nonetheless, I'm surprised to say that while climbing around at Angkor I considered counting myself a member of the YOLO school of archaeological preservation.

These pictures are from Bayon, one of the few temples whose name I remember. Don't worry, I bought a mustard yellow tank top with an image of the temple, so it is now truly immortalized.

You can just climb ALL over it! Also, I'm really high up in this picture, but you can't tell.

Another thing I thought about while seeing ruins was whether monuments like this are a testament to the possibility of some kind of earthly immortality or not. After all, they are ruins--not really in the best shape, for the most part. And the names of the individual people who did the actual work of carving those intricate reliefs and even the names of the genius architects who designed them are completely lost to history. But these powerful and impressive relics still remain to wow people centuries later, so I guess that's something. On the other other other hand, nothing that most of us do has any kind of monumental status like these ruins. Nothing I do will ever make as lasting of an impact as these crumbling buildings, either at a tangible or an intangible level. In fact, nearly nothing that's been built in the U.S. recently will probably last very long at all--or if it does, will it be at all impressive?

The scenes that impressed me the most where views of nature taking back over the buildings. Why should that be such a beautiful sight, though? It's kind of chilling to see a tree growing up and through this testament to human effort. It's a smack in the face by nature, really, and on a metaphorical level I don't appreciate it. (In fact, I'm going to go cut down a tree right now just to show 'em who's boss.) But then why is it so picturesque and even pleasant? I think there's probably some darn old-time Romantics out there to blame for making our culture like these scenes.

Here are some pictures of trees and temples and their forbidden love. I couldn't stop taking pictures like this. 

We spent a lot of our time visiting temples considering where we would spend sunrise and sunset to get the best views. It's kind of a shame not to plan daily life like that. It seemed like a horrible thing to miss sunset or to not see it from the nice vantage point of the top of a relatively uncrowded temple, but on a daily basis I let sunsets pass me by while I do silly things like write blog posts. My grandmother Soltan was really good at appreciating sunsets. She would often call us up to tell us to look out the window at a particularly good one. I'd like to take on more of that attitude. Heck, I'd like to take one a lot more of her attitudes. She really kept it real.

Sunrise, Sunset.

Unexpected view of Angkor Wat at sunrise from the top of the hill we climbed to see another temple.

Enjoy some pictures, which really can't capture how amazing this place is. I was afraid I'd hyped up the site too much in my mind--and I'd hyped it up a lot--but it still exceeded my expectations.

Relief on the side of this temple, seen in magic hour light at sunrise.

Oh, the reliefs!

All of the outer walls of the huge structure of Angkor Wat are covered in intricate reliefs like this.

You can see these guys' little shirt flowers!

Angkor Wat, the big fish itself. We visited here last, so that we could appreciate smaller temples first and not feel underwhelmed by them. Angkor Wat is huge--we thought we had gone around and would be leaving by a back entrance, but we ended up being totally confused and came out the same way we went in. The place is just massive. 

Ok, so this is the outer gate of Angkor Wat seen from the inside. It covers a HUGE area. Also,  it is surrounded by a moat that I sadly have no great pictures of.

Inside of Angkor Wat. I can't convey the scale to you, but to get to this level we walked up really steep stairs.

I was going to put more miscellaneous pictures, but this is getting excessive. Suffice to say you should all go to Angkor Wat, and going here made me finally sure I'd made the right decision in up and running off to Southeast Asia. Goodnight!