There in Cambodia-see for understanding the evolution and history of Southeast Asia. Of the first, the museum of horror of the Khmer Rouge, and I spoke in my last post. Today I will tell you the second, much more enjoyable and related to the primary purpose of this website: and travel history.
These are the temples of Angkor, more complex 40 square kilometers in which you can visit, and it is therefore essential to devote at least three full days, nearly a hundred Buddhist monasteries built and occupied between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, and where, for very little that someone purchased the historic architecture, is impossible not to be amazed by the magnitude of beauty and progress which reached the Khmer Empire.
The Angkor complex is located northwest of the country, near the town of Siam Reap, which has become a place of pilgrimage tourism in all Asian travelers. Upon payment of 20 U.S. dollars, if one day visit, or 40 if you want to spend three days, the visitor will receive a card and pocket guide here either expect to find anything in Spanish-.
You can gain the services of a guide, but also will have to be conformed with one English. Together with a group of four Spanish to which I joined after a few beers the night before, try to find a guide who could tell in Castilian. Was impossible.
The rivers of ink have been written about the Angkor complex, whose bid to be one of the new seven wonders of the world was about to be successful, so too in the bore with details.
But, to give you an overview, Dire Khmer empire that el, responsible for the creation of this huge city Buddhist, dominated throughout Southeast Asia for centuries, until, for reasons still poorly determined, decided to leave Angkor in the mid-fifteenth century and established his new capital Phnom Pen, the current Cambodian capital.
Some accounts say was the harassment of the hordes of Kublai Khan, first, and invading the kingdom of Siam, after, forcing back the Khemeres. Others say that, actually, was the scarcity and difficulty in accessing water, and the inability to get good crops, what ended the existence of this kingdom, which was once one of the largest in Asia.
Abandoned in the depths of the jungle, Angkor languished forgotten until a French explorer, Henry Muhout, rediscovered it in 1.860
Abandoned in the depths of the jungle, Angkor languished forgotten until a French explorer, Henry Muhout, rediscovered it in 1.860. Years later, Cambodians finally became aware that his past was a treasure to exploit, and gradually word spread in western Asia was in a mysterious place where the average age spoke stones, of lost kingdoms, Magic.
And 1992 UNESCO declared World Heritage Angkor, and today there are more than one hundred thousand annual visitors this succulent piece of the pie Asian history.
To highlight any, I will say that the country can not go away without seeing the tempos of Angkor Thom, Ta Prom y Angkor Wat. Perhaps the most impressive is Ta Prom, called the temple of nature, because their land was literally invaded by trees, being virtually hidden from the world in the jungle, which gives it a ghostly and Indiana Jones film.
You also have to go through the temple of Bayon, which has a tower 45 feet high topped by four major Buddhist heads, and surrounded by other 54 smaller towers. In Bayon can see at least 150 stone faces that make him the nickname creditor temple of a thousand faces.
However, better known temple, es Angkor Vat, dedicated to the god Vishnu. Thirty years did its construction, and consists of five towers with their respective symmetrical five shrines which make it the largest religious temple in the world, with nearly two square kilometers. It will retain the largest known reliefs, and which describes the whole history of Hindu mythology.
There are a vestige of that era that has lasted to this day and that is another major attractions of Cambodia: las Apsaras. They are dancers in the temples, in whose hands held the secrets of the ancient wisdom and knowledge which have passed from mothers to daughters, generation after generation. View the Apsaras dance is a show that, however it tourist, not to be missed.
Here ends the historical immersion in medieval Cambodia. The next step is to re-take the pulse of this. Watch closely the efforts of a country struggling, growing even, weigh in international crises, to leave behind one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century. Vamos a ir a Ratanakiri, an area midway between rural and tourist exploitation of the forest ... We'll see what it fill our eyes ...
