Click on images below to enlarge:
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| Another main entrance to the temple. Look at the towers, the crumbled
stone, and, of course, the tree (and especially its root structure)!
| Ditto, just a bit over-exposed.
| Tuk-tak drivers relaxing outside the temple waiting for their riders to
return.
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| Ta Prohm (Jungle Temple)
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| Our first glimpse of Ta Prohm, the Jungle Temple.
| This strangler fig owns this building. Could be an excellent
photograph without the people.
| Close-up.
It's too bad Angkor had such bright days that the sky is
often washed out in pictures.
| An even closer cropping of the tree that's taken over this temple
building. Maybe excellent.
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| An excellent panorama taken from one corner of Ta Prohm.
| Another strangler fig slowly crushing a building. Even the bark is
beginning to be camouflaged with the stone, both showing the same aged,
weathered look.
Someone said it looks like a scene from a sci-fi horror movie.
| I like the contrast in this panorama: solid nature (trees) on the right
and the nearly-collapsed man-made buildings on the left.
This
picture also shows Ta Prohm's outer wall.
| A panoramic movie of Ta Prohm (Jungle Temple) taken within one courtyard.
It provides a great sense of what it felt like to be there: trees,
buildings, ruins, and even the sound of insects in the background. If you
pay attention, you'll notice not not only trees taking over buildings but
also one growing out of the top of a building.
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| What a tangled tree trunk!
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Our guide showed us that one room in the temple is an echo chamber: pound
lightly on your chest and the sound reverberates. Neat.
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| Lunch at Borey Sovann
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| The pleasantly overgrown entrance to our lunch restaurant, Borey Sovann.
| Lok lak beef / loc lac beef, topped with a fried egg. The beef was a
little tough but was overall seasoned well. I ordered it because it's the
Cambodian version of Vietnamese shaking beef / shaken beef, which I'm
often a fan of. This version did not displease me.
| The menu entry for the lok lak beef.
| An omelette, appropriately salted, and with a few flakes of fish inside.
It was a bit crispy, which went well with the liquid in the tomatoes
(served on the side).
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| The menu entry for our fish omelette.
| Papaya salad, containing the usual: shredded papaya (the long strings),
tomato, basil, carrots (well, this may not be common but it's not
surprising), lime juice, and chilies. It wasn't as spicy as the Thai
versions of papaya salad I've had.
| The menu entry for the papaya salad.
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| Old Market / Siem Reap Town Center
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| A typical downtown street in the touristy center of Siem Reap, near the
Old Market.
| A sugarcane juicing machine in a street cart. It works like those
I saw in Singapore. I'm sorry I didn't get a picture of it in action
(though I did get to see it in action).
| One side of Siem Reap's Old Market (Phsar Chas). In the heavily-shaded
darkness are shops.
| In the case of the previous picture, the shops in the blackness sell cured
meat and fish. I like the look of the dried octopus. I also like the row
of motorcycles and the hanging baskets.
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| A sample corridor in the Old Market. You can see a cross-section of the
wares commonly for sale: clothes/fabric, statues, and jewelry.
| Another corridor.
| The food section of the market.
| A long line of vegetable stalls.
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| Many cooling jellies.
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Some stands at the market prepared or cooked food. The most common stand
made fresh spring rolls.
| Another sample street in downtown Siem Reap. Though not visible in this
picture, the street has three places offering cooking classes.
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The next street has at least half a dozen foot massage parlors (places
where feet are massaged).
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One shop sells musics and videos. Prices begin at $1.50 to load one to
eight albums on an iPod. My first thought was, gosh, iTunes is cheap in
Cambodia. Then I remembered that BitTorrent exists.
| An ad for an internet cafe, with many logos used without permission. I
actually think it's pretty neat how they combined the firefox and and IE
logo, and that the firefox logo seems to be eating the IE logo. It's also
interesting--perhaps a comment on their clientele--that the firefox logo
is larger and more visible than the IE logo.
| Architecture from the days of Cambodia's colonial past.
| A park along the Siem Reap river. The picnic table at left might be a
nice place to eat if it weren't so darn hot in the sun.
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