There is lots of reconstruction and conservation work going on at Phnom Bakheng (at many of the other temples, too, but Phnom Bakheng seems to be the biggest effort right now). Over much of the area at the base of the temple, neatly numbered stones are waiting for the day when they will be put together again.
The tool for putting them back together? Two modern cranes. Carrying the stones up the steep stairs - even the wooden staircases built on top of the original ones are very steep at Phnom Bakheng - would come close to a suicide mission.
The view from the top of Phnom Bakheng is great: jungle as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by a hazy vision of Angkor Wat a few kilometers away.
When I left Phnom Bakheng to enter Angkor Thom, I encountered this: a big traffic jam at the southern gate, caused by the fact that there's only a single lane going through the gate.
With my bicycle, I jumped straight ahead to the front of the queue and laughed a bit at all the tourists having to wait in their buses... sometimes there's just nothing better than a bit of schadenfreude, isn't there? ;-)
The next day, I heard that there are plans to extend the Siem Reap airport. The airport currently has the capacity to bring in 2 million tourists per year. The plan is to extend this to 15 million. Now, seeing the traffic jams constantly forming at Angkor Thom's south gate, I wonder: how will they deal with all the additional traffic?
Besides all the temples, Angkor Thom has another attraction: monkeys! They are used to humans - no doubt because of the occasional banana they steal from tourists - so they hang around calmly even when they are carrying very young baby monkeys.
I found it very cute to observe how they were looking after the baby, and also how they were taking care of each other by eating insects off of each other's furs.
But - back to the archaeological attractions. Bayon is the biggest and most important temple inside Angkor Thom. From afar, it looks like a big and slightly unordered pile of stones, especially when seen at angles that are less favorable than the one in this picture:
When you get closer, however, the pile of stones turns out to be an elaborately decorated pile, consisting of more than 50 towers, each adorned with a huge face on each of its four sides. There are a total of 216 of these faces in Bayon, all of them two meters or more in height. Very impressive!
Along the base of the temple there is another gallery of bas-relief carvings, similar to the one in Angkor Wat. Reality and the descriptions in my travel guide failed to converge, however: I just couldn't correlate what I was seeing with what I was reading. I wouldn't be surprised if the travel guide's description matched some other temple instead of Bayon ;-)
One part of the carvings depicted marine life such as turtles, fish, and water plants:
What I found interesting to note throughout Angkor was the use of motives from Hinduism and Buddhism. The early Khmer kings all followed Hinduism, and consequently the temples were dedicated to Shiva or Vishnu or Brahma, and were full of Hindu mythology. Then Buddhism snuck in, and for a while Buddha statues co-existed with Lingas and Shiva statues. Finally, Buddhism took over as the sole religion and new temples carried only Buddhist imagery. Phnom Bakheng, for example, was a Hindu temple, while Bayon was a Buddhist one.
The next temple in Angkor Thom was Baphuon - much less grand than Bayon, but interesting to climb nevertheless.
The temple's top offered an amazing view of the lower levels and the causeway leading to the temple. In earlier days, the temple may have been completely surrounded by water.
The final part of Angkor Thom that I visited was the central square and the buildings on its side. One of the sides is occupied by the Elephants Terrace - named that way for the elephants lining the staircases, I suppose. Apparently, the terrace was used by the king and other high-ranking persons to witness military parades taking place in the square. A parade with elephants, horses and chariots must have been quite a sight!
