This region of Cambodia, the beating heart of the ancient Khmer Angkor kingdom, reminds me of nothing so much as Carthage (here and here), in the sense that you can’t swing a cat without hitting astonishing and significant ruins. This place is thick with historically and culturally meaningful sites. We could spend another month here just being thorough, but our four weeks here has been cut a little short by Dorothy’s injury. So we’re doing the Greatest Hits, which is not a bad thing.

Bayon

Possibly even more than Angkor Wat, the massive Buddha heads of Bayon are the single most iconic image of Cambodia. Even if you don’t know they’re in Cambodia, you recognize them.

Interestingly, the Angkor-era temples are the only part of Cambodia that the Khmer Rouge didn’t systematically destroy. Rather than seeing them as evidence of moral decay, as they did the arts, or a threat, as they saw the sciences, the temples represented the strength and power of the Cambodian people, the state to which the Khmer Rouge wanted to restore the nation.

So they let them stand, as exemplars of what the Khmer had once achieved and what they should aspire to in the future. Which is just plain weird on its face, as the regime wanted to return Cambodians to an imagined, “pure” agrarian past, but had murdered anyone capable of building monuments to the glory of the proletariat.

But I don’t suppose they took power on the back of the unassailable logic of their arguments. Thanks to that twisted logic, we still have Angkor Wat and Bayon, among many, many others, to appreciate today.

Also, while Angkor Wat had “Beware of Monkey Attack” signs, we never actually saw any monkeys there. Not so Angkor Thom. The temples had monkeys, the roadside jungle had monkeys. There was no shortage of monkeys on this visit. Besides us.

The Gates

Both Angkor Thom and Bayon are squares oriented to the cardinal directions: North/South/East/West. Bayon has four gates, one on each side, and the city of Angkor Thom has an extra gate, the Victory Gate, on the East side.

Angkor Thom’s gates are impressive structures of their own, irrespective of what’s going on within the city’s walls. We entered the South Gate and got our first glimpse of the imposing giant Buddha heads. Each of the four gates is topped by four Buddhas, each pointing in a cardinal direction. The bridges that lead to them depict the Hindu story of The Churning Of The Sea Of Milk. Because of course they do.

We’ll skip over the plot elements that brought our protagonists to this dilemma, but the gods and the demons needed to collaborate to churn the Sea Of Milk in order to extract the Nectar Of Immortality, which was achieved, somehow, by pulling on the Naga Vasuki, a giant god snake. The gods took the head and the demons took the tail. And they lived happily ever after.

One side of the bridge shows the gods pulling Vasuki from the head and the other side of the bridge shows the demons pulling from the tail. As you traverse the bridge, you travel through the gate that the four-headed Buddha watches over. It’s a pretty monumental passage, and it’s impossible to be unmoved by it. Much like the soaring Catholic churches meant to awe the peasants, the gates to Angkor Thom proclaim to all who pass through them the power and piety of their creators.

The monumental Buddha heads stand watch over each gate.

Magic Happens Here

As built, Bayon had 54 pagodas with four faces each. That’s 216 big Buddha heads. 37 of the pagodas remain. Which is still a lot of Buddha heads.

There’s something weird about seeing in person a thing you’ve seen in pictures over and over. I remember visiting MoMA when we moved to New York and seeing Starry Night for the first time. There was so much depth and detail that the reproductions couldn’t capture, it was disorienting. I simultaneously felt like I knew it well and had never seen it. Same with Monet’s Water Lilies.

And same here. The images of these heads are so iconic, seeing them in person was like seeing two things at once, the photographs in your head like a scrim over the real thing right in front of you. But the scrim fades, and you’re left with only the reality, which is breathtaking. If I was capable of emotions I’d have had some. There were feels all over the place, and I could almost sense them.

Just like Angkor Wat, every surface is pavéd with decoration. It’s not all there now, but it’s clear there was no unadorned surface when it was built.

Some of the friezes are really big. Really, really big.

Ta Prohm

If someone asked you to close your eyes and picture an ancient temple being reclaimed by the jungle, you’d be imagining Ta Prohm. Part of that is because the whole trees-growing-through-temples thing is so iconic on its own, but also because it served as one of the primary locations for the 2001 Tomb Raider movie.

Which makes it similar to some of the Star Wars locations we visited in Tunisia. What made those sites interesting wasn’t that they’d been in the movies. It was that they were so alien in their natural state that they qualified as outer space movie sets. Who doesn’t want to visit a place like that?

So it is with Ta Prohm. I have no more interest in it because it was in a movie than I did in the Star Wars sites (which I didn’t even want to see initially, as I thought they were only of interest as movie trivia). What’s interesting about Ta Prohm is the vibe that motivated the filmmakers to use it as a location. That seemed worth checking out.

The whole thing has a distinctly Tikal ambiance, another place where the boundary between jungle and temples is porous. Here though, it’s not the general encroachment of the jungle, it’s the opportunistic nature of the local spong trees. Ta Prohm was built without mortar, leaving room for the spong trees to take root in the loose stones.

The effect is spectacular.

Preah Khan

We had one more temple on our itinerary, but at this point we had both museum eyes and museum legs. I confess we didn’t spend much time at Preah Khan. It looked like the outbuildings at Bayon or Ta Prohm, not having a distinctive feature of its own, like the big Buddhas or the spong trees.

How jaded are we? But we had put over three miles on Dorothy’s recovering limbs that day, which was enough. There. It’s her fault.

Local Monasteries

In addition to the Angkor-era temple complexes, Siem Reap is blessed with a slew of in-town neighborhood monasteries. Open to the public, the grounds and buildings tend to be both lavish and peaceful. We visited two of them, because what else are we doing, but we could have made them a tour of their own.

Preah Prohm Roath Monastery

A mere five minute walk from the Sturm und Drang of Pub Street sits Preah Prohm Roath, the Disneyland of monasteries. Built in 1915, it’s known for its lavish grounds and an enormous golden Buddah that lives in the main shrine, which is from 1945. The buildings and grounds all still seem shiny and fresh. Especially compared to the Angkor era temples, all at least 900 years old.

Surrounding the Buddha shrine building was a 360 degree gallery of friezes.

The outdoor sculpture garden is amazing. Like a Hindu version of El Castillo de Los Duendes in Oaxaca, but with fewer Keebler elves.

Wat Bo

Wat Bo is a little older than Preah Prohm Roath, having been built in the 18th century. It’s just across the Siem Reap river from Pub Street and the night markets, nestled in a comfortable, active neighborhood. It’s not as elaborate as Preah Prohm Roath, or as goofy, leaning more into its quiet beauty. It’s a lovely afternoon stop.

But every building was over the top in its own way. It’s impossible not to be charmed by an aesthetic built on the concept of More. It spoke to us directly. And loudly. If we had a coat of arms it would read Si Aliquid Est Bonum, Melius Est. If Some Is Good, More Is Better.

Sitting in their cool gardens is a pleasure on a hot day. Which is all of them.

Tikal Walks Into A Sidebar

So this is that thing I do where I find some flimsy excuse to jam in a story from our past that’s tangentially, at best, related to something from our current travels. In this case, I’m using Ta Prohm’s comparison to Tikal to shoehorn in the tale of our 30 minute trip to Tikal, in the year of our youth 1985.

I have to start by confessing that at this moment I have no pictures of our Tikal trip. I thought I’d finished digitizing all of our photos in the run up to launch, but I missed the albums with our Guatemala and Tikal photos. I’ll send them out when we get back to Chicago, but I’m probably 7-8 months away from being able to add pictures to this post.

In our late 20s we were able to cobble together enough shekels for our first real vacation, the kind that can’t be done in a car. Dorothy had a textile book called Guatemala Rainbow, and all of the photos were of people wearing these ridiculously vibrant textiles, rather than just pictures of fabric. We wanted to go where people wandered around dressed up like that. There are worse ways to pick a destination.

We decided to get there by buying a package tour to Cancun. It was cheaper than just buying the airfare, and they let us extend our return date. We blew off the hotel portion of the package, which gave us two weeks to get to Guatemala and back to Cancun for our flight home.

And that was the extent of our planning. We didn’t know how we were going to get to Guatemala, we didn’t have any accommodations arranged, we didn’t even know exactly where we were going once we got there. We’d made a half-hearted attempt to make plans, but this was pre-internet, so making those arrangements long distance was hard. This was why travel agents existed, but we rejected the notion of planning the entire trip to the day. We’d wing it. What could possibly go wrong?

On the eve of our departure I called the State Department hotline for their Guatemala assessment. I’d waited until the last minute on purpose, as I expected we’d dislike the recommendation. We were traveling on the eve of their first putatively free elections, and expected there would be tensions. We were correct.

The hotline told us that we needed to: avoid a list of specific cities, the bulk of which were on our to do list; check in with the consulate the moment we landed to provide our detailed itinerary, which didn’t exist; avoid travel at night, which was the only stricture we could follow; and be prepared to be robbed at gunpoint, although kidnapping was deemed unlikely. But not impossible.

On mature reflection, we decided that if a State Department warning existed for tourists traveling from Iowa to New York City, it would sound about the same. And that as hardened, streetwise New Yorkers, we could handle whatever Guatemala threw at us.

What could possibly go wrong?

So we flew to Cancun, rented a car and drove to Chichén Itzá, where I had to get rescued from the top of the pyramid, kept going to check out Mérida, and decided that we’d get to Guatemala from there, so we ditched the rental car (its own story) and grabbed a flight.

We deplaned in Guatemala City, got the last rental car left, and headed to nearby Antigua, getting lost on the way in the dark. No GPS. We stumbled into Antigua and drove around until we found a nice looking hotel. They had a room for us.

That was our protocol for the whole trip. No plans, play it by ear, everything will be fine. We constantly saw tourists who’d made plans, or thought they had, struggling. The hotel they thought they’d reserved didn’t have a room. The guide they thought they’d arranged never showed up. And here we were, happy idiots, blithely blundering into repeated good fortune. It made stupid look admirable. And also set a lifetime of travel preferences. We still don’t like to overplan. Although we are slightly less intrepid than our 20-something selves.

And that’s how we planned to get to Tikal. The highway through the Peten jungle hadn’t been built yet, so the only way to get there was by plane. We figured we’d spend a couple of days there, get to Belize, spend a few days on one of the cays relaxing, and then get back to Cancun for our flight home. Easy, right?

We tried to figure out how to fly from Flores, the nearest airport to Tikal, to Belize, but what information we found didn’t make any sense, so we reckoned we’d make arrangements in the airport when we landed. Worst possible case we’d take a bus, as it was only about 140 miles. Worst worst possible case, we’d rent a car or take a taxi.

The only information we had was on a gas station style folding map. On the back it had a matrix of cities, showing the distance between them and the driving time. Except our map clearly had an error for Flores-Belize City, as it showed a travel time of twelve hours. No way that could be correct. That was just over ten miles/hour for the whole distance. Impossible.

Dorothy hadn’t had much plane time prior to this trip, so she was a nervous flier. Still is, a little bit. As we’re waiting in the terminal in Guatemala City for our flight to Flores, she’s checking the tarmac, afraid we’re going in something tiny. She’s relieved when we’re finally called to board, as the only plane out there is a big jet. Not so relieved when we hit the tarmac and walked behind that jet to a plane so small it had been completely hidden from view.

But all good, we fly to Flores on our little plane and no one wets themselves. A win is a win. I go to the desk in the terminal when we land to make arrangements to fly to Belize in a couple of days. To be told that there isn’t a flight in a couple of days. There’s one the very next morning and another four days later. The first flight meant we wouldn’t be able to visit Tikal, the entire point of this escapade, and the second one meant we wouldn’t have time in Belize, and if there was any hiccup we’d miss our flight back home from Cancun.

So I asked about buses or taxis, and was told that the twelve hour map estimate was about right, as it was mostly a dirt road. Or would be about right if the road was open. Which it currently was not, having been washed out in the recent rains. I’m a clever boy, so I ask about flying back to Guatemala City and getting to Belize from there. To be told that the flight to Guatemala City from Flores is the return flight from Guatemala City to Flores. Which happens twice a week.

Very reluctantly, we booked a flight to Belize for the next morning. Now all we had to do was find a place to stay, since we hadn’t made any arrangements in advance. We tasked our taxi driver with finding us a hotel, but he’d heard our saga. He told us that if we left at seven in the morning, he could drive us to Tikal, about 90 minutes each way, and get us back to the airport in time for our flight. We’d have about half an hour at Tikal, but that sounded better than missing it completely.

What could possibly go wrong?

The actual town of Flores is an island in Lake Petén Itzá reached over a narrow causeway, just barely above lake level. Our driver navigated us into town and left us at a hotel with rooms. We’d see him in the morning. The hotel was… interesting. We got to the front desk to check in by walking across the cinder blocks on the floor, as the first floor was a little lake all its own. Like a lake fractal. Lake, at every level of magnification.

We were given a room on the fourth floor, walkup, obviously, and assured that the water ran several times a day. How very convenient. It happened to be on right then, so we filled up a couple of buckets so we could flush the toilet.

Dorothy was a little beat up by all of this, so I ventured out into town to find some victuals and return with dinner. When I got back she was shaving her legs in one of the buckets, a fierce, desperate attempt to bring order and civilization to a disordered, uncivilized situation. Perhaps the single most Dorothy moment ever, and the picture of her that will probably flash before my eyes as I’m dying.

Sure as shootin’, our driver picks us up at seven. We leave our luggage safely minded on the first floor cinder blocks and make our way. We get our promised thirty minutes at Tikal, which, on the one hand, awesome, but on the other, sad. We deeply regretted being unable to tour Tikal properly.

OK, we head back to our hotel to pick up our luggage and go to the airport, which is right on the mainland side of the causeway. Except the causeway is blocked by the military, who explain that part of the causeway had collapsed since we left three and a half hours earlier, and no one was allowed on while it was being rebuilt.

I’m not at all sure what our driver said, but we were allowed to pass, and maneuvered delicately around the skiploader, with only the lakeside wheels in the water. We fetch our luggage, inch back across the causeway, and get dropped at the airport with moments to spare. They should have been ready to call boarding.

If our plane had been there.

But it wasn’t. It was late. As it turned out, six hours late. We sat in this tiny provincial airport for six more hours. We could have had a full day at Tikal.

*sigh*

We did get our three days at Ambergris Cay in Belize, in a hut right on the beach, just a few minutes to the reef. That was exactly the tonic we required after the tsurris of our aborted Tikal visit. It was glorious. Although we got to and from the Cay on a de Havilland Otter seaplane, which made Dorothy positively nauseous.

But because we’re apparently incapable of learning, we had one last gasp of stupid before we returned home.

We flew from Belize City to Cancun, and could have done the simple, obvious thing and stayed in Cancun overnight to take our flight the next day. But Cancun is boring, and Tulum, this was long before it got built up like it is today, was only a 90 minute drive south. We rented a car so we could spend the day on the beach at Tulum, overnight there, drive up in the morning and make our flight, no problem.

What could possibly go wrong?

We drove to Tulum, parked at a hotel by the highway, checked in, dropped our luggage off, and got into our rental car to drive the short distance to the beach and the ruins. Which car would not start.

We were able to get locals to push us and got the car started. With no promise that, if we turned it off again that it would restart, or that we could draw enough folks to get a push start. So we returned to the hotel. Dorothy grabbed the luggage while I gunned the engine in neutral.

We drove back to Cancun with my foot never leaving the gas. There wasn’t a lot between Tulum and Cancun in those days, so the car dying on that road would be bad. In the dark, since it was an unlit highway. And, because there was clearly some headroom left for agita, the most driving rainstorm I have ever, to this day, driven in. The rain was coming horizontally.

We made it back to the airport to return the car, where much arguing ensued. All of which I lost. First, I had nicked a bumper on a high curb, making a U-turn to get into the airport without letting off the gas. And of course, when the agent went out to check the car, it started right up, undercutting my entire argument.

Fine. Whatever. We had a cabby take us to the nearest place with an empty room, and we made our flight home without any additional drama, self-inflicted or otherwise.

We’ve been to Guatemala three times now, because we love it so much, but on this adventure I’d rather go to places we’ve never been before. But we just discussed, when we do the South America portion of our travels, stopping off at Tikal on our way back. 30 minutes didn’t do it.