Following our first day of walking, climbing, and playing incessantly; we had planned for the second day to not be as physically exerting. There was a temple and a few other things that required a car to reach; thus, we hired a tour guide with a car and that's how we got around. We were being escorted around via a big white van, the 4 of us in tow with our tour guide and the driver in the front. The morning was a bit overcast as a result of the early morning rain showers.
On the way, the guide talked our ears off, but it was way too early for me to communicate or want to attempt any type of communication. The first stop on the way was 38 kilometers from Siem Reap to a temple named Banteay Srey. This was a Hindu temple built in the late 10th century. According to a pamphlet, the name of the temple roughly translates to Citadel of the Women. However, many people just say this as a metaphor to refer to the “beauty of the carvings.” This particular temple was made of pink sandstone – so quite different from most of the temples we had seen on the first day. Walking to the temple area, we walked through an island walkway. On the sides of this walkway was plenty of dirty, brown water. I don't know if it was meant to be some type of moat or if the rainwater had just puddled there to give that false affect. When you reach the temple, you see it is a nice, quaint temple – maybe if walking straight around it – only taking 5 minutes. However, in this square were many raised towers and small rooms that our guide informed were at one time a library. These towers are unique in that some open in one cardinal point and others open in others. There really were intricate carvings all over the temple – that our tour guide filled us in on all the stories. Many of them were based around the Hindu God Shiva.
After this relatively quick view, we had a quick breakfast whereby I witnessed some shady business by our tour guides. Cambodia, like most developing countries are corrupt in many practices. For a harmless example, our Tuk-tuk drivers, like these drivers as well – do something along the lines of contracting out to certain restaurants to bring us to. We are pretty positive that these restaurants in turn, give our drivers some sort of commission from our business. I didn't mind it with our tuk-tuk drivers mainly because when we said “we're hungry” they told us where to eat. However, with the drivers on this day – they chose the times and places we were going to eat. I didn't mind too much being told where to eat – as I am sure all the food was the same anyways, but we weren't too happy when our drivers on this day told us WHEN to eat as well.
It was at the restaurant where I was just casually observing my surroundings that I watched a woman walk up, give money to our drivers and walk away. Then, this next example is what I thought was really shady. We were all in the van waiting to drive off from breakfast when a man was walking by our van. The driver rolled down his window, stuck his one hand out – then I noticed them do a “high 5” in a “hey, what's up?” kind of way and I saw the swap of what was maybe money or even possibly drugs, I have no idea. It was at this time that I was very grateful to have a man with us and not just us 3 girls traveling.
After a very seedy breakfast, we started on our way to our next stop for the day – which would take us quite a while again. It was 12 kilometers to our next destination, Kbal Spean. In order to reach this area, we had to do about a 45 minute hike uphill through the bush to see it. While it was rather humid and hot already – it was really nice to be out in nature. We had one view that was tremendous, showing that Cambodia does in fact have more than just the desert landscape we'd been viewing to this point. On the way, we saw cool white trees, interesting bug, reptile and amphibian wildlife, a rock that appeared to look like a spaceship, vines, all sorts of fun nature wonders.
I figured we'd reached our intended location when I heard the solacing sound of a waterfall being invaded by tourists with preying cameras. Kbal Speak is a river with waterfalls that has carvings behind the waterfalls, under the river, along the bank, on protruding rocks, - these carvings called lingas.
History moment- the linga cult. The Linga Cult was a sect of Hinduism centered on the God Shiva, who was worshipped in the form of a linga (ie a phallic symbol). Most of the Hindu temples at Angkor housed stone lingas, which were cared for and worshipped. Water that passed over lingas became sacred, even magical. There is an interesting appliction of this belief at the 'rivers of 1000 lingas' at Kbal Spean where lingas were carved into the riverbeds in order to 'fertilize' the waters that fed the rice paddies below.
As you just read, Kbal Spean has 1000 lingas carved into it. Moreover, there were countless amounts of Buddha and Buddhist images as well polluting or beautifying the river. (depends how you look at it).
It is rather spectacular to see how these carvings are still nearly perfect after years of water flowing over them or past them. It boggles my mind how they haven't eroded away since they were carved sometime between the 11th and 13th century. We spent around 30 minutes admiring all that was around us. I particularly enjoyed the waterfall that was near the bottom of the river, I seem to love the sounds of waterfalls the most. The walk back down from this area was much quicker than our walk up, which was nice because it seemed that it was getting more crowded with tourists.
Again, we were taken to another stop for lunch at a randomly placed restaurant in the middle of nowhere. It was a cute restaurant and soon we were joined by dozens of French tourists on both sides of us. Thankfully for us, we had already ordered our food. After lunch we had about a two hour ride to our next temple – the main reason we booked this tour. I was able to fall asleep for most of the trip which made the two hours seem go by quicker than I had thought they would. This last temple for the day that we visited was named Beng Melea , a Hindu temple erected sometime in the early 11th century. The reason many people spend the time(it's 63km east of Siem Reap) and extra money(another $5 to view) to get out to this temple is because it has not been restored yet. You can go to this temple and view it as it was once first discovered, with trees growing all over it, moss on the concrete blocks that have yet to be picked up, vines, animals, how nature is left untouched can and will take over what man has made. Some call it the jungle temple and you can see why from the pictures. It covers one square kilometer. According to the guidebook, this temple may have been a prototype for the now- most famous actual Angkor Wat temple.
We first walked on the outside of the temple, first observing how quiet this temple is in comparison to all the temples that we viewed previously. It was thundering loudly overhead when we first arrived, leaving the sky quite dark and scary. It did really feel like the lost temple feeling that the guidebook said it would. After observing the outer wall of the temple we climbed our way into the temple. As it is not restored, we literally had to walk over, through, around, into all sorts of passageways since there was no walkway. None of the stones had been cleared – and it made for difficult walking. Thankfully, I had packed sneakers so I switched from my sandals to sneakers and it made these climbs a bit easier. There's really no way I can put into words more about this temple so let me just show some pictures from it from here on out.
At the end, right when we were walking back to our van – our tour guide gave us all umbrellas and said “it's going to rain”. We took our umbrellas and not even a minute later it down poured on us. And maybe only 3-5 minutes into this very heavy, crazy downpour...it stopped, just like that. We all climbed into our van relatively dry and napped until we reached back to our guesthouse, marking the end of our second sight seeing day in this area.
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