The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

The landmine museum is a collection of munitions collected around Cambodia. Many by a single individual who defused at least 50,000 landmines personally. His story is quite fascinating, but long so I will not write it all in here. That’s what Google is for.

Due to a number of wars and proximity to Vietnam and Thailand many parts of the country were blanketed with mines, or has unexploded munitions scattered through the forests. Some are harder to spot that others.

A major problem with bombing areas is that many bombs fail and just lie in the ground waiting to cause problems in the future.

These are all examples of shells that were defused in Cambodia.

The munitions can be dangerous for over a hundred years. Just recently there was a WWII bomb found in Germany that caused an evacuation to allow for defusing.

Many devices were designed to maim instead of kill because injuries cost more to a military.

Unlike the movies there is no click, just a bang once triggered. Due to the efforts of several NGOs the number of people killed  or injured by landmines in Cambodia is just over 100 a year. This is still too many and people are working everyday to continue clearing these cheap destructive devices.

This was a pretty small temple.

The statues weren’t the highlight.

There were a bit different though which was nice.

The highlight was that they used a very soft sandstone in the building.

It was also surrounded by a moat filled with lillipads.

The roofs were also like Angkor Wat.

The soft sandstone allowed for really complex carvings.

The carvings were really well preserved and defined.

But the stone is also quite soft so they have the temple roped off.

So this is as close as we could get.

Which is really too bad because there were monkeys guarding this temple.

We woke up well before the crack of dawn to see the sunrise over Angkor Wat.

However fitting with our previous luck on sunrises, it was cloudy, so the sunrise was rather boring.

Angkor Wat looks most impressive from the outside, with the long bridge across the giant moat followed by the huge gate.

Way back in the corner there you can see the famous “five stone pineapples, fringed with flames”.

They are much easier to see from the temple on the hill across from it.

Inside around the bottom are tons of intricate carvings.

And hundreds more apsaras, which quite clearly have straight legs, straight hips, and feet shooting off in the wrong direction.

They also have no knees, but sometimes their legs have a weird curve in the thigh.

The top sanctuary was decorated with thousands of these lobsters.

Or maybe they are roosters?

Or maybe even some kind of weird flower?

A lot of the repeated carvings seem to have the sculptures playing a game of telephone, where they carve a symbol on one end and by the time they get across to the other it’s completely different.

The windows were barred which makes the view out not very good.

The carvings were very well preserved and on some of them you could still see traces of paint.

Or even gold leaf.

One panel showed lions in a conga line dancing on the shoulders of a line of soldiers.

Another showed a god riding a snake wearing a saddle.

But you do not need a saddle to ride a flying eagle-man. You just stand in the awkward dance position on his shoulders and it works great.

More dignified gods ride in chariots pulled by lions.

Underneath the water are crocodiles, fish, and lions with elephant trunks. Because where else would you look for an elehpant-nosed lion?

I think the guide book said this was a depiction of Hell, but it looks more like a circus. Maybe that’s the same thing.

Kerri attempted to replicate the awkward dance posture but is not nearly flexible enough. Also only men were allowed to do it.

But Matt wouldn’t even try.

And that was Angkor Wat.

Getting around Cambodia was done primarily in a remork, which is a four wheeled cart pulled by a motorcycle.

You should not feed the monkeys from your remork.

In Siem Reap this was the most common style of gas station. Can’t remember if we used green or yellow fuel.

Sometimes it would just be old glass bottles filled with a litre of fuel.