Temple Tour Extraordinaire

Luana has asked me to give the details of our tour of Anger What, or was that Angkor Wat? Whatever.

We spent an afternoon touring Wat and then the next day toured seven other temples, all within about a half-hour drive of one another. Luana even got up at o'dark thirty for the sunrise at Angkor Wat. And there were many temples we didn’t even see. (We flew to Cambodia from Vietnam -- about an hour’s flight.)

Temples are the big business in Siem Reap, a town now of about 200,000 in north-central Cambodia. About 2 million tourists a year visit the area, so the town has many nice hotels and no McDonald’s or other American fast food except one Dairy Queen in the local airport. The largest number of tourists come from Japan, followed by South Korea, France, Germany and the U.S.

The temples are of both Hindu and Buddhist origins and most were built in the 11th or 12th centuries by a variety of kings and Wall Street financiers.

The temples were mainly built of sandstone and have a variety of fantastic carvings in them, although many are in a state of some disrepair from centuries of neglect, war, etc. They virtually disappeared into the jungle for about 400 years, with the French beginning to uncover them in the 1800s. There are bullet holes all over the Angkor Wat temple from the civil war in the 1970s, and we also heard that many families hid out in the temples when they were fleeing the genocide.

We could just show you some of our cool pictures of the temples, but I think it is also important that I describe in some detail the Hindu myths that underlay all the carvings. HEY, WAKE UP OUT THERE!!

OK, as I understand there were these three important Hindu gods: Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, and at the creation of the world they fought over this sea of milk. Brahma won by destroying the other two in the Worlds of Warcraft video game, but the Sea of Milk was drained in the process, so Brahma wandered the world saying, “Got Milk?” However, I may have misunderstood some of what our guide was explaining to us, but you get the general idea.

So on one afternoon we toured Wat, which is about a mile square. The next morning we went to Angkor Thom temple, which is Cambodian for “Luana rode the elephant here.”

Then we went to Ta Prohm, which has a lot of trees growing out of it and is the place where the movie “Tomb Raider” with Angelina Jolie was shot. Considering the artistic merits of that movie I kept suggesting to our guide that Cambodia should tear down that temple. For some strange reason, he thought I was joking.

It was a little hot for our tour -- about 98 degrees with 90 percent humidity. The guide said we were lucky since it gets hot in April and May.

After our morning, Luana offered some cogent and profound analysis of our tour: “It’s too damn hot; I’m going back to our air-conditioned hotel room.”

I went on because I thought our guide said we were going to the Big Boob temple. I guess I misunderstood, or perhaps he was talking about me. Anyway, we who stayed for the afternoon toured the Hot temple, Hotter temple and Hottest temple before concluding at the “Hurry Up Through This So We Can Get Back on the Air Conditioned Bus” temple.

It was all quite spectacular; there were a lot of elephants and lions and monkeys and snakes and gods and goddesses. Our guide was very informative about it all. And I especially liked the little kids selling cold cheap Cokes. They should have their own temple. I would worship there.