The YRC Visits the Largest Religious Monument in the Universe and Other Tales from the Three Buddha Trail..

The Three Buddhas

Hello,  greetings and welcome back to this week's Yellow River Chronicles.  The YRC was delighted to host two senior (yuk yuk...age joke) contributors from the Empire of Corn, the American MidWest, to assist in this three-part series.

Hold on, because our whirlwind adventure includes Siem Reap in Cambodia, mysterious Bangkok and the World Below the Clouds in Yunnan in Western China.  We shall call these series of adventures, Tales from the Three Buddha Trail.

A Brief Reminder:  As you may recall, or regret as the case may be, the YRC eschews chronological travel narrative, personal spiritual insights, good writing of any kind, restaurant reviews, accuracy, pictures of food, and other traditional travel writing bon mots.

We do this as a courtesy to our readers, out of a thinly veiled sense of superiority and a quite open aversion to good note-taking.

In reality, a YRC report done in the contemporary vein would read something like this:

So, we arrived in...somewhere in Asia, just in time for the ..umm Festival of Curious Hats or something like that.   We got some hats to wear, but we got lost and the cab smelled like prunes or perhaps prune danish or perhaps raisins and our hotel was on that street that's was in the movie "Hangover Three".

However, despite all that, we will follow the Tales in chronological order.  So, we now jump unapologetically back to the beginning of the story at hand and the first stop, Cambodia and Angkor Wat.

Post-card, French,circa 1911.  Note the fruit

Cambodia, a country still recovering from a long and violent civil war, dates back to 612 AD. Its most famous monument is the temple complex of Angkor Wat. The ancient city of Angkor used to be a capital of the ancient Khmer Empire and was one of the largest cities in the world. This huge complex of buildings, covering about 600 square kilometers, was the center of the vast the Khmer Empire until it was destroyed by Siamese troops in 1431.  To give you a sense of historical perspective, 1431 is the year that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

More than 100 palaces and temples are concealed under lush tropical forest. 

One of the temples, Ta Prohm is known even to those who have never traveled to Cambodia before: this is where scenes from Tomb Raider 2 were filmed.  I have not seen the film but the roots were quite impressive.

What are you three idiots doing here?

The entire Wat complex is extremely popular.   Around one million people visit each year and once the doors open in the early morning, large groups of tourists wearing gaily colored matching hats stream into the site to have their pictures taken in front of things.  

The competition can get quite intense as roving bands of tourists stand with cellphones leveled waiting for the opportunity to work through a group of fifty, each of the them having their picture taken with their camera in front of the same tree.  This can take quite a bit of time if you are simply waiting to get by.

For example, the famous "Sunrise Over the Wat?" photo opportunity involves hiking in at 5:30am in the morning to sit by the moat while thousands of fellow photographers arrive with cameras and cell phones to also capture the sacred moment.

To capitalize on this, the Tourist Board of Cambodia is launching a new program called "Never Be Alone in Cambodia".  No matter where you go, no matter who you are, no matter what time it is, or what you are doing, You Are Never Alone in Cambodia!

Enjoy the stillness as the sun rises over the Temple!

The site itself was awe-inspiring. We will be using our sister site Click here to go the the picture site, please to publish a more "in-depth" photo collection in the near future.  And tune in next week, when the three Buddhas head to Bangkok!