Ta Prohm is a unique other-world experience. It has been left to be swallowed by the jungle, and looks very much the way most of the monuments of Angkor appeared when European explorers first stumbled upon them. Ta Prohm is a temple of towers, close courtyards and narrow corridors. Many of the corridors are impassable, clogged with jumbled piles of delicately carved stone blocks dislodged by the roots of long-decayed trees. Once again that was in 2002.

Bas-reliefs on bulging walls are carpeted by lichen, moss and creeping plants, and shrubs sprout from the roofs of monumental porches. Trees, hundreds of years old - some supported by flying buttresses - tower overhead, their leaves filtering the sunlight and casting a greenish pall over the whole scene.

One temple has been so overgrown by trees that they now form a structural part of it and so the trees cannot be removed.

Yet another very big tree.

It does look a bit like a setting for the computer game Tomb Raider. There is also a movie, starring Angelina Jolie, who has fallen in love with Cambodia and now adopts children and gives money to worthy causes. Angelina Jolie stars in the movie as the heroine Lara Croft, who has many mystical adventures.

This temple is one of my favourites. It has a quality of zeitgeist.

This is the back door which leads to the path in the next photograph.

It is probably OK to walk down this path since the area has been logged, but this is Cambodia and there are land mines. But maybe this is one of the back doors into the temple complex and so you can avoid paying the entrance fees.

Page created in 2002 and updated on January 23rd. 2014.  angkorwat  sign guestbook  You are visitor number