You'll be glad to hear that we're at our last temple, Preah Khan. This was a large monastery, and housed 100,000 people in its heyday, and is also one of the unrestored temples. It's one of my favorites, largely because there were lots of fragments that you could mentally piece together to see how the site originally looked, and the whole thing looks so fragile. While it survived for centuries in the jungle, it will be interesting to see how these ruins hold up under the strains of mass tourism.

After viewing photos of your sixth temple, you may sympathize with my lazy friends and decide you've had enough temple viewing and move on. And I don't blame you, but I'm going to charge along nonetheless, and further entice you with a teaser that the celebrity temple is coming up next. But first, some photos of Banteay Kdei, a very large Buddhist temple from the 12th century.

The large body of water is Srah Srang, which was either built for irrigation purposes or, more likely, religious ceremonies. The platform in the photos was the king's dock, and is now occupied by begging kids. One downside of Siam Reap is there are dozens of little kids following you around everywhere, selling postcards, drinks or just begging. They're cute and friendly rather than aggressive, but they are persistent so you either have to buy lots of postcards (which of course attracts other postcard vendors notwithstanding that you just satisfied your postcard needs with the previous vendor) or tune them out. I've also thrown in a photo of another temple, Prasat Kravan, at no additional cost to you!

The Vietnamese sacked Angkor Wat in 1177, and the king then started a new capital city, Angkor Thom, a couple of miles north. I'm not sure why the entire area is always referred to as Angkor Wat rather than the proper town name of Siam Reap, because the large majority of photos are actually of Angkor Thom rather than Angkor Wat. And that pictorial preference is due to the fact that the king had his face built into the city walls, temples, guard towers, pretty much everywhere, which makes for some cool photos.

Despite its abandonment for many centuries, Angkor Wat is now firmly entrenched as Cambodia's national symbol, and occupies the center of the Cambodian flag. In 2003, it also touched off one of those incredibly stupid international incidents that seem to happen all the time in Asia. A Thai actress was reported to have said that Angkor Wat actually belongs to Thailand. Now, of course she said no such thing as everyone eventually agreed, and even if she had, she's hardly in a position to set Thai foreign policy. All it took was the rumor that this was said, and the Cambodians went wild, burning down Thai owned banks, hotels and other businesses in Phnom Penh, the capital, laying seige to the embassy while mobs wandered the streets looking for Thais to lynch. The Thai navy had to come in to rescue the remaining Thais and for a while it looked like war would erupt, all because of a fake rumor of a comment by an actress.

Angkor Wat was built in the 12th century as a Hindu temple, like most of the Siam Reap temples. It was then populated with Buddhas in the 13th century, then the Buddhas were hacked up by a subsequent Hindu king, then partially restored as the country permanently became Buddhist. What the Hindu king didn't desecrate treasure hunters carted off after it was rediscovered, so the overall aesthetic is of a Hindu temple decorated with headless Buddhas. The very general idea is that the tower complex at the center of the temple is supposed to be Mount Meru, where the Hindu gods reside, and then the city was organized around this base.

59. Siam Reap, Cambodia Feb '01

My friend Reza was touring around Asia to celebrate being one of the last people to profit from the last days of the internet boom. We spent a couple of days in Bangkok and then took the one hour Bangkok Airways flight to Siam Reap, where we met his friend from business school. The four of us spent three days in the town exploring the world famous temple ruins. Well, actually Somchai and I did most of the exploring, while Reza and friend petered out relatively quickly. The temples are ridiculously atmospheric, but there are over seventy of them, spread over many miles and situated in the hottest place on earth, so at some point the marginal utility of each new temple diminishes rapidly.