Angkor Wat, Cambodia in 2014

I visited Angkor Wat in the February of 2014 during my trip to Cambodia. It is a place unlike any other and has it become very popular with tourists in recent years.

But let's start with a bit of history. The name Angkor Wat means literally "city of temples" in Khmer and it is to this day the largest religious site in the world. It was originally dedicated to Hindu gods before being converted into a Buddhist temple site. Its construction started in the 12th century and it took about 300,000 workers about 40 years to build it. The central 5-tower temple is designed to represent Mount Meru, the sacred five-peaked mountain of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist cosmology which is considered to be the center of all the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual universes.

To this day we don't know for certain what led to the fall of Angkor and Khmer Empire overall but some of the possibilities include prolonged periods of drought, plague, or loss of royal authority from conversion to Theravada Buddhism in which kings were not treated as god-kings anymore.

Visiting the temple complex

I traveled to Angkor with a personal guide who picked me up in Siem Reap. He patiently explained the history and was passionate about the modern geopolitics of the region. The entrance required a purchase of an Angkor pass, however Cambodians can visit for free.

Before we reached the main temple complex we stopped at a number of smaller temples like Bayon and Baphoun surrounded by jungles. Many of these were in process of restoration.