World Travel 2013-2014, The Beginnings of Angkor Wat Archaeological Park – Banteay Kdei

Today was a full day spent at the Angkor Wat Archaeological Park visiting several different temples including Banteay Kdei, Pre Rup, Ta Phrom, Bayon and surrounding temples as well as Angkor Wat itself. We did all of these temples over the course of a full day, on a bicycle riding about 35-40 kilometres during the day. What you’ll notice though is that unlike previous blog posts, the full days worth of activities has not been condensed into the one short post. I prefer to keep posts short (too long and it can get a bit boring), and the photo number as a multiple of three, preferably no more than 15 photos. Why three? I have no idea, it just seemed like a nice number when I started the blog.

But that’s where we hit a bit of a problem. See, I rather enjoy visiting temples. In fact, I enjoy visiting temples a lot – so much so I think poor Takeshi has been templed out. This love of visiting temples has also lead to a lot of photos in Angkor Wat Park (and I mean a lot of photos), and while I’ve had difficulties on previous occasions to get the photos down to a reasonable number for the site, this time I’ve had even more difficulty.

Solution? Post more photos and split our day at the park into more blog posts!

So here we go, prepare to be templed out. Here is the first of what will probably be quite a few posts on the temples of Angkor Wat Archaeological Park, our first temple of the day – Banteay Kdei.

Banteay Kdei is a rather beautiful temple located not far from Ta Phrom and Pre Rup and is a part of the Grand Circuit. Built in the Late 12th – Early 13th century AD, it is built in a similar style to the famous Bayon and Angkor Wat temples. This temple is particularly beautiful in my opinion as it is still largely unrestored, with some work currently under way to stablise and restore parts of the temple. Unfortunately the quality of stone and construction wasn’t excellent to begin with, leading to the current state of the temple; however, I felt that it had a lot of character and structures this old are unlikely to be in one piece anyway!