Preah Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

Admiral Kirk's least favourite Khmer temple. Right, that's the rubbish pun title over with. Come on, I know it's another Cambodian temple, but at least it's one of the nice overgrown ones and not another of those pyramid ones. You know you've visited too many temples in too brief a time when the prospect of clambering over a 1,000-year-old pyramid loses its appeal.

Preah Khan was the last temple I visited on my Cambodia trip, and is probably the one I'd least mind getting trapped within forever as some sort of malevolent spirit, doomed to haunt its crumbling passageways for eternity, or until someone builds a car park over it. The fact that I managed to muster some enthusiasm after feeling seriously templed out must mean it's something special.

Templed out

Cambodia's ancient temples are my favourites I've seen in South East Asia, and second only to the monuments of Ancient Egypt (it's all downhill once you've seen the pyramids. My life since November 2010 has been a pointless postscript). But I'm glad I signed up for a second day of templing to make the most of my limited time in this country, though ideally this second day would have taken place about two weeks later in Earth time, so I could have appreciated it more and felt less fatigued.

On the way back to my hotel, after two days of tramping around ancient ruins, we passed a temple that I thought would be particularly nice to visit, and I felt a mixture of sadness and relief that the tuk tuk continued and didn't stop. Then I wondered if I'd visited it the previous day after all. Then I realised it was the Bayon - probably the most distinctive temple there is, but one that my historical architecture appreciation glands were incapable of processing due to overload. I didn't even recognise some of my photos when I looked back at them.

Thanks to the wonders of post-dated blogs, I was able to forget all about Cambodia for a few weeks and clear my head before doing these write-ups. Except now I can hardly remember what was where and why it was wherefore. I'm not even sure what the first pyramid temple here is called, except I'm pretty sure it's not Ta Keo (that's just the closest match I've found). To get the full benefit of the following blog post, you may wish to deprive yourself of sleep for a couple of nights and watch an Open University lecture on enumerative combinatorics so you haven't got a clue what's going on.

If it's broke, don't fix it

'Dilapidated' has always been one of my favourite words (I'm a writer; I have those), as well as my all-time favourite state of deterioration. It's why I prefer the dingy Nostromo from Alien to the sanitised Discovery from 2001, the run-down Red Dwarf from Red Dwarf to the sleek UFOs from UFO, the gritty Battlestar Galactica to the U.S.S. Enterprise. And probably some more varied examples that aren't sci-fi spaceships too.

I like walking around historical ruins, but I want them to look old. Not just lived-in - I want them beaten down hard and not given the chance to get back up. I was never interested in visiting the extravagantly maintained Edinburgh Castle when my bus used to drive past it every day, but I always jumped at the chance to spend a night in dangerously ramshackle castle ruins out in the Scottish wilderness (there's another one: 'ramshackle').

So as you can imagine, I was pretty enthusiastic to explore some Cambodian temples that really hadn't been very well looked after at all. If these jungle temples were children, their parents wouldn't let them stay up late to watch The X-Files and Cracker until they'd cleaned that bloody mess up. Contrary to appearances, some of these places have actually been pretty extensively restored - but that didn't include chopping down the trees, clearing the vegetation or evening out the exploded brickwork. They know decent dilapidation when they see it.

That one with the big faces

The 216 identical giant stone faces gazing serenly out of Prasat Bayon will already be familiar to anyone who's ever walked down any tacky party street in any city in South East Asia and seen cheap fibreglass imitations adorning gaudy clubs unfailingly named 'Angkor Wat.' These establishments are presumably run by the same people who think the Sphinx is in Cairo, that every establishing shot of Britain needs to have Tower Bridge in it and that Frankenstein's monster was named 'Frankenstein' (when we all know 'Frankingstein' is the correct pronunciation).

There's no need to get too pedantic about this arguably trivial distinction between two ancient cities located a short tuk-tuk jaunt from each other that were abandoned more than four centuries ago, but I've made the thankless effort to label these photos correctly so you're going to bloody well learn something.

Visiting the compact and creepy Angkor Thom directly after stomping around its broader and more famous relative really hammers the differences home. Which is what I'm going to attempt to do here. With real hammers.

You Wat-n't like me when I'm Angkor

This is the big one - the 12th century Hindu/Buddhist/Hindu-again/Buddhist-again-and-let's-all-get-along-now temple/city complex at the heart of the Angkor Archaeological Park, with its five distinctive towers that have worked their way into all non-harrowing imagery of Cambodia in recent years (it's not that one with the big faces though, that's another one).

It wasn't my favourite temple in Cambodia - not by a long way - but it was a great starting point. Even if my tour group's actual starting point (arriving around 9AM) was possibly the worst time for taking photos. I hope you like blindingly bright backgrounds and obscured details.