Ta Prohm - Angkor's "Jungle Temple"

We spent some time plotting out a two day itinerary for our brief stay in Siem Reap. There's no shortage of temples to visit, so we had to parcel out our time and prioritize what we wanted to see. Over the years, there's been a couple of circuits that travelers have developed, to be efficient with their time and visit the temples in an order that makes sense. While those plans looked OK on paper, they didn't really match up with our schedule. We needed to plan our visit to try avoid the huge crowds of people who descended upon Angkor for Khmer New Year, and also to deal with the unbearable heat of the midday sun. Plus, there are some inherent limitations on how much you can really take in on any given day. So we settled on a plan that entailed visiting Ta Prohm, Ankor Tom, and Angor Wat on our first day. On our second day, we'd visit Angkor Wat at dawn, then head out to see Banteay Srei, Banteay Samre, and whatever else we could fit in. While that doesn't sound like a lot on paper, each of those visits entails climbing countless stairs and trekking from one place to the next on foot, which gets tiring really fast when the heat index is past 40 degrees celcius (over 100 degrees fahrenheit). These are some of the world's largest monuments, and seeing them is no small task...

We started the day off at Ta Prohm. This is the famed "jungle temple" of Ankor that was made famous by its use in the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Angelina Jolie filmed a few scenes here, and as a result, the temple was overrun with tourists taking pictures next to "the tomb raider tree." Although we tried to beat the crowds, there's no avoiding the crush of tourists in Angkor, and while our visit to Ta Prohm was awe inspiring, it was also infuriating. Becky and I both find oblivious, self-involved tourists to be hugely annoying, and Ta Prohm was filled with people stepping on our feet, inadvertently getting in other people's pictures, and trampling through the space with little regard for anyone else around them. It was irritating, but not enough to obscure the magic and mystery of the temple in question. The place is simply stunning.

What make Ta Prohm particularly poignant is the way the jungle has completely overrun the monuments. Giant trees have wrapped their huge root systems around the enormous eroded stones, and where there was once symmetry and order to this temple, there is now a sense that the ambitions of the men who built this have been entirely eclipsed by the laws of nature. This is the jungle's turf, not man's. Originally constructed in 1186 as a buddhist temple, this brooding ruin of a structure is in a unique state of decay. The stones are covered with lichens and the walls are wrapped with creeping vines, and huge trees have grown up in and around the structures, using the stones as building blocks for enormous root systems. Multiple nations are helping to restore parts of this temple, and outside of its main wall there are hundreds of the original structure's huge stones that have been marked for placement in various spots throughout the temple. It is, as our guide put it, "the world's biggest jigsaw puzzle." It's hard to really imagine what this temple could possible look like once it's been restored, since so much of it seems beyond fixing. Trying to describe in words the incredible look and feel of Ta Prohm is an exercise in futility. It's like something out of a fantasy novel... Have a look at a handful of the pictures we took. Everywhere you look there's something camera-worthy, so we spent most of our morning dodging fellow tourists, rolling our eyes at some of the more obnoxious travelers amongst us, and shaking our heads and marveling at the magic of this enchanted place. Some ruins feel tragic, because there's a humanity to their decline that you can't help but feel attached to. Ta Prohm was not like that for us. Life never stopped here. When the humans abandoned it, the trees moved in...