Sunday, August 5, 2012

Angkor Thom

Siem Reap

The city of Siem Reap is the home of the famous Angkor Wat as well as many other ruin temples. Below are pictures of some of the beautiful ruins we saw on our first day here. There are so many ruins to visit that several days are required if you want to really look at all the magnificent structures and go back to explore more your favorite ones. We are planning on spending at least five days to visit the temples.




Angkor Thom

Angkor Thom is 3 km2 walled and moated royal city and was the last capital of the Angkorian empire. The city was constructed in the late 12th to early 13th century. After King Jayavaman VII recaptured the Angkorian capital from the Cham invaders in 1188, he began a massive building campaign across the empire, constructing Angkor Thom as his new capital city.





There are several structures within the walls of Angkor Thom. While visiting those structures, I took over 150 pictures. I tried my best to capture the beauty of these ruins, but it is quite difficult some times. Angkor Thom has four gates, each of them is crowned with four giant faces (like the picture below).





The series of statue below are found on each side of the road leading to the Angkor Thom gates.



Bayon

Of all the structures and ruins of Angkor Thom, the Bayon temple was my favorite.



The temple has 37 standing towers with many of them sporting four carved faces. Who the faces represent is a matter of debate but they may be Loksvara, Mahayana Buddhism’s compassionate Bodhisattva, or perhaps a combination of Buddha and Jayavar-man VII.




















These are pictures of other beautiful structure and décor you can find at Angkor Thom.















Beautiful red dragonfly on floating plants.





























Ta Prohm

This temple is very pretty because of its jungle overgrowth. Restoration work is underway but they intentionally left this complex partially unrestored with the massive fig and silk-cotton trees growing on the structures giving it a “jungle atmosphere”.



I couldn't take a picture of the full width of the temple as there were too many people in front of the main entrance. This is the left portion of the ruin.









Alain in front of one of those giant tree roots.









1 comment:

  1. Whoa. These ruins look amazing! So glad some overgrown trees were spared. Now, since there were so many four-faced sculptures around you, did you feel like someone was watching you... ;-)

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