Angkor Wat

I can't find a way to succinctly describe Angkor Wat. We spent the late afternoon of our first day there, under a merciless sun, and then we came back at dawn the next day to see it in all its glory at sunrise. No amount of flowery descriptions could do justice to this temple. It's a mystery and a marvel and something everyone should put on their bucket list. I'm glad to have crossed it off of mine, but I do believe we'll have to return, to delve deeper into this building, and perhaps to try once again to photograph it. On the first day we visited, I found it hugely frustrating to try and take pictures, because the scale of this is lost in pictures, and on my rinky-dink little camera I couldn't find an angle that really felt right. This place is impossible to wrap your head around, on multiple levels.

Constructed around 1152 by the Angkor Devaraja Suryavarman II, this "mother of all temples" was built to honor the Hindu God Vishnu. There are countless unique characteristics of it, and there are details and halls worth exploring that make the place well worth repeated visits. As the world's largest religious structure, it's astonishing that this was constructed in the era in which it was, without machinery to ease the burden on the workers who built it. It took 37 years... It's in better shape than the other Angkor temples...but it stills bears a lot of the marks of the turbulent history of the Angkor empire. Have a look at some of the pictures we took below. They're just a glimpse of what we saw, and this building is an infinitely deep mystery well worth probing...