The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

The terraces are big stone platforms that are pretty boring, but have really intricate carvings along the sides.

Like this guy, who looks like he’s holding up the terrace.

This eagle decorates the corner.

This is a replica of a statue that was covered in lichen, resulting in the terrace being called the “terrace of the leper king”. The replica doesn’t have the lichen, so it is pretty boring.

These are the three headed elephants on the terrace of the elephants.

This temple was tall.

The carvings were mostly destroyed.

It had trees growing out of it.

It had barred windows.

And a fairly big Buddha statue.

But it was mostly just a very big stack of stones in the jungle.

With a stairway leading up to it.

This is a smaller pyramid temple.

It was guarded by animals on the corners. Possibly sheep?

It was also guarded by lions at the stairs. But not much remains of this one. Like most of their lions the number of toes on each foot seems to vary randomly from 4 to 6.

I’m running out of things to say about temples, and there are at least 20 more to go in Cambodia. And many more in Myanmar. And probably at least a few in Thailand. I think the people who claim they read every post twice are going to fall asleep this week.

The Baphuon is an 11th century temple which was on a big site with a long stone walkway up to it.

The temple is big with a steep staircase.

Many of the side buildings are ruined except for their doorways.

The temple is mostly reconstructed but there are a lot of bits laid out around it that they haven’t fit back together yet.

The walls are very steep so looks more like a big stone building than a pyramid.

The hallways are very long and narrow.

Many of the intricate carvings are still visible. This one has a lion, a bunny, a catwoman and a pig.

Most of the carvings tell stories from Hindu mythology.

Which we don’t know well enough to identify any of these.

Or these.

A lot of the patterns are repeated over and over again. Except that with different people carving the same thing over and over again they change over time. So these ones kind of look like butterflies.

But the same pattern on the other side looks like this.

From up top there is a good view back over the jungle.

This is another side building that is mostly collapsed.

Going around the corner the wall looks oddly bulgy.

I still didn’t get it from this angle.

From the middle you can finally see it’s a giant Buddha sleeping on the side of the temple. This was carved much later in the 15th century when the temple was repurposed as a Buddhist temple.

This is the main room at the top.

There are several Buddha statues which are guarded by monks.