#2178 Ta Prohm - the jungle temple

The final stop on our Angkor Wat tour was Ta Prohm.  The jungle has really taken over - or at least tried its best over the centuries - and trees are growing on the temple itself. You may have seen this temple in the movies: this is the temple where parts of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie were filmed.

There are many places where the trees have attached themselves to the temple. It looks like the Cambodians are attempting to restore parts of it. There are huge blocks of rock piled throughout the temple and with all the visitors there every day every year, I'm sure it's slow going. The place is kind of otherworldly. It's big, too, but without stairs, making it pretty unusual since we climbed many stairs in the other two places we saw.

This is the front of the temple. We came in from the other side. You can see green moss growing on the building and the trees all around there.

These next four photos are of the interior. It's sort of open concept. There seemed to be an open plaza type area surrounded by different rooms. You can see the detailed sculpture work and the apsaras (women dancers). You can also see where trees have attached themselves to the walls and grown. Check out how large those blocks are.

Here are a couple of photos showing how the trees have attached to the buildings.

Check out the size of this limb.

photo by MT

Here is a fun thing I saw:

Another fun thing...before I left, my friend Nicole was reading a Scholastic magazine with her son and it showed a photo of what looked like a dinosaur carving at Ta Prohm. She sent me a photo of it and I decided I would try to find it and take a pic to show it was really there. When I asked Narun about it, he knew exactly what I was talking about and exactly where it was.

The second one from the top is the one that I was looking for. Doesn't it kind of look like a stegosaurus? Just now, though, when I was looking at the photos, I was fascinated by the one on the bottom. It looks like something from Where the Wild Things Are, you know, that great children's book by Maurice Sendak. Fortunately, MT took a photo as I was walking away from this cool wall and he got a pretty good shot of it.

photo by MT

I kinda love it!

That's all I have to share about Angkor Wat and what we saw there. If we had been there another day (as originally planned) we would have seen a different part of the park and a temple that I'm sad we missed. Guess we'll have to see that next time!

If you are interested in reading a little more about Ta Prohm, here is an interesting post.