“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”

“Angkor.”

“Angkor who?”

“No. Angkor Wat!”

My rapier wit came up with this gem whilst standing in a growing crowd of people at 5.30 in the morning. In front of me all I could see was darkness. And we stood, at least 1000 of us now, and we waited.  

The less reserved early morning voyeurs pushed past us on their way to the best view in the house, some even wading into the lake infront of us to set up complicated looking cameras on high tech tripods.

And we just waited.

It made me realise that I don’t often wait like this anymore. I may wait for a tide to turn but I’ll occupy myself with something else important in the mean time.  I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years waiting in hospitals but there’s always wifi.  During the last 6 months we’ve waited for planes, having arrived at the airport far too early in our nervous keenness, but there’s always a pub. But this time it was just us, and several thousand other people, all waiting. No wifi. No pub (too early anyway!).   No important jobs to get on with. Just waiting for the sun to show us what we were all there for. Waiting.

And sure enough, as the sunrises in the morning, the sun began to rise. To start with it was just a hint of orange that strangely didn’t seem to add any light to the sky. Then it was joined with more yellow and a strange grey light that I don’t think I’ve seen before.  

You could feel the anticipation in the crowd building; cameras were poised and checked, iPhones were held aloft, conversation grew louder and more urgent and then suddenly we saw it.

The magnificent curves of the ancient temple tops emerged from the rapidly growing light. They looked eerie and gothic at first and one dimensional in the flat, grey air.  But then the sun began to illuminate the background and we saw the temple in its all ruined glory. 

It was a breathtaking sight and I tried my very best to shut out the shutters and flashes firing all around me and the jostling for position and the loud complaints of the slackpackers next to me who were generalising  that all Chinese people who had ever lived were rude and disrespectful. It occurred to me that, once upon a time, some early riser visiting Siem Reap must have said to his travelling companion,

“Hey. I’ve got an idea. Let’s go and see Angkor Wat at sunrise. I bet it’s magical and a spiritual experience.”

Nowadays,  you queue the night before at a purpose built series of airconditioned ticket offices armed with your $37 entrance fee. In the morning you queue in your tuk tuk with all the other explorers and show your ticket with your photo on it and then join the queue to get over the drawbridge to the main event.

So was it spiritual or magical? It was a phenomenal experience and one that I feel very privileged to have experienced.  It reminded me of watching the total eclipse back at the end of the last century from up on Dartmoor. We had set off in our van in the middle of the night from Barnstaple, in search of a quiet spot up on the vast and usually desolate moor that offered a “total” view. In the end we queued for several hours and watched it with thousands of others on the side of the road on the edge of the moor. I remember the magical moment when the sun disappeared and the world went silent, apart from the guy chatting to his mate next to me about the price of houses in the south west. It was comparable. Fabulous moment but….

The big difference to the eclipse was that in ’99 we didn’t have iPhones. Somehow that made a difference as at Angkor Wat; it felt like most people were more focused on recording the event than being part of it. That’s been a common theme throughout our travels and has made me think a lot about how living in the moment is challenged by our obsession to capture it on our phone, perhaps to edit later. “Why?”,  I increasingly ask.

Gradually, the corner of a building started to show us the magnificent edifice. It was built in the 12th century as a Hindu temple and Wikipedia tells me it’s largest religious monument in the world. As the sun rose and the sky went an electric pink the ancient towers began to glow in front of us and reflect in the pool of water. Then an unexpected thing happened. The sun was now “up” and providing intense Asian heat, and it dawned on me that at least 90% of the crowd I’d been part of had started to make it’s way towards the temple, I suspect eager to get to the front of the queue that was already developing to go up to the top of the towers. (As it happens, they may have been disappointed as the towers were closed due to it being a Buddhist holy day.)

I would have left with the mass exodus. I’d seen the sunrise at Angkor Wat. Tick. But fortunately, my guide and wife, who had visited earlier in the week with Fin and Summer while I slept off a nasty case of Cambodian Street Vodka, told me to wait, for the best was yet to come. We found ourselves in a small group of people, right in front of the water, slap bang in front of this magnificent building. And Kate was right. Although the sun had risen it hadn’t reached a point in the sky when it truly lit up the temple spires and turrets and windows and suddenly it did. We watched in silence. It was, literally, awesome. The ancient monument glowed in front of us, every stone, each angle, thousands of windows and statues and the water and white lilies between us and the temple all looked on fire. It was a sight I will never forget and one we shared as a couple holding each other and bathing in the moment. Beautiful.  

And then it was over. The temple was in full daylight and we joined the queues to explore inside it.  

The things that I noticed inside the temple were; 

It’s size – everything is huge and I felt overwhelmed by some of the staircases that led up towards the heavens.

It’s intricacy in design and construction. The sculptures in the stone are phenomenal and all have meaning and tell a story.

The decapitated statues. When the temple changed from a Hindu holy place to a Buddhist place of worship in roughly the 15th century, Hindu deities were replaced by huge figures of Buddha and Hindu statues were removed or adapted.  Then, through war, civil war and the poverty and desperation of local people who could sell parts of the statues to buy rice the statues had their valuable heads removed, along with the gold and jewels built into them.  It creates an eerie and mildly freakish effect. It was a reminder, if you ever need one in this country, of the lands tragic history. Local people had apparently been encouraged by neighbouring enemies to smash the heads off and sell them and others had been desecrated by the Khmer Rouge and sold to fund their ravaging.

The mix of Hinduism and Buddhism was bizarre and I found ironic. Two competing world religions celebrated across one vast site. Vishnu up there. Buddha over here. It just needed a bimah, altar, minaret and langar hall and all the gods would have been happy.

We spent the rest of the morning visiting 4 more temples with more wonderful architecture, design and breathtaking grandure. The highlight was probably the jungle temple, an iconic site that our guide, reliably told us, was where “…Angelina Jody filmed Tim Rider.”!

Of all the religious buildings I have ever visited, for me Angkor Wat is up there with the most inspiring. I loved the light and peace of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and this was nothing like that. These temples were dark and at times forboding.   But Angkor Wat gave me some insight into thousands of years of dedication to deities that people lived and died for. I felt privileged to feel that sense of people’s stories for a few seconds as the sun shone rose over milenia of history.  And in that moment, I even managed to snap a few photos on my mobile.

James.