Angkor 

Today I overcame my loathing of road cycling, and undertook the 26k loop (plus 7k there and back) of the Big Circuit of the Ankgor archaeological park. On a 20-year old Chinese ladies bike (rental $2/day) with 3 gears and a pink basket on the front. All the decent bikes had gone. The pink basket met with ridicule on several occasions, but - ha! - made the bike dead easy to find at all the stops.

The Angkor site is massive. I spent 2 days here on my first time out in SE Asia, but there are so many sites to see it was 4pm today (day 2) before I looped back into the walled city of Angkor Thom at the north gate, and eventually recognised stuff I'd covered last time. Still, I had one massive pyramid I'd previously neglected, to keep me busy. This was interesting because a) it's massive, and b) its western 2nd tier was rebuilt in the form of a massive reclining Buddha in the 15th century, long after the rest of Angkor was abandoned.

Among this melange of archaeological sites there are trends emerging, but I'm not going to try and summarize them just yet. One major problem is the names - they just all seem so similar and it's hard to make them stick. Might have to learn some Khmer. One thing though: the earlier temples have Sanskrit inscriptions, and tend to be Hindu (obviously an Indian influence), while the later structures include labyrinthine Buddhist monasteries, dating from a switch in religious allegiance after Angkor Thom was invaded and sacked by marauding (I love that word) attackers from what is now Vietnam. The Khmer won the place back, rebuilt, and built some more massive temples etc, with a Buddhist theme. 

The whole complex has several massive (and dozens of smaller) rectangular terraced reservoirs, and it's thought that this water storage system was crucial to the power base, agriculture, and economy - and when it began to fail, so did the city. So, the fall of the Khmer civilisation doesn't seem to have much in common with that of the contemporary Mayan one, despite a very similar structure of competing city-states. I suppose we in the West did all this in about 500 BC in Greece. Then Rome too, got to be quite big before it collapsed. Which wouldn't matter much for us in 2013 if that dithering Emperor Constantine hadn't converted to Christianity in 312. Nice one Const.

Still, the best is yet to come: I bought a 3 day pass and have 1 day left for the most famous stuff - Angkor Wat itself, the Bayon, and the Indiana Jones/Lara Croft-invoking Ta Prohm.