Of all the temples if been to in Angkor, the Ta Prohm temple is certainly one of the more memorable. If you have seen the Lara Croft movie you know what I mean. From the outside, the temple doesn’t look particularly interesting. For one thing the temple takes a back for once.
The Ta Prohm temple was built by Jayavarman VII in what seems to be a jungle, quite a distance from the city. However, this is a huge temple that took more than ten thousand people to maintain. It was known at that time as the royal monastery, which would explain its size.
There is a stone house at the entrance and is surrounded by really tall trees. The entrance itself already needs to be supported lest it collapses. We were taking pictures of the uninteresting entrance before going through it. Once in, we were amazed to find out that the tall tree behind the the entrance was actually growing on top of the stone house. The root of the tree reaching down to the ground and surrounding one of the doors.
It is no wonder that the stone house needs to be supported, if the tree grows too large there is the danger that it may collapse. I wonder how the authorities would decide which to go of it was found out that the structure is in danger of collapsing. The roots of the tree already give the temple such fame, but at the same time it could might as well be destroy the temple which it gave such fame to.
The temple is huge, around one hectare. While touring the grounds, I got my first taste of mass tourism in Cambodia. There was a busload of flag-toting Korean tourists noisily going through the temple. It kind of ruined my leisurely stroll around the temple grounds so I decided to let them through so that I can have the temple all to myself later on. It was a good thing that their tour guide was rushing them through the temple so they were gone in five minutes.
The temple grounds were surrounded by very tall trees, some of them leaning perilously. I was a bit wary of walking near those trees lest the choose this time to come crashing down on me.
In fact, it was not only the trees which are leaning dangerously. Some of the walls of the temples are not supported at all and lean quite badly. It feels like if someone just as much as touches the wall, it would come crashing down.
There was another impressive tree choked door on the way out and in some ways is quite creepy. However, it is this very fact that give Ta Prohm so much character.
Not all of the grounds of Ta Prohm is open to tourists. There was a large area that was off limits because of restoration work. On the way out, there were a couple of impressive gopuras. This temple must have been really impressive in its day.
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