Ta Keo
Next up on my itinerary was
Ta Keo, built around 1,000 AD for Jayavarman V. It might be the first sandstone
temple-mountain to have been built by the Khmer. It was also never completed, apparently because during construction a thunderbolt hit the structure and people at the time took it to be a bad omen and dropped everything, never to finish.
When I arrived near the entrance at 2:15pm or so, I noticed that parts of the site were being worked on.
Fortunately not too much was off limits!
Looking back:
The theme here was clear: rectangles.
This was a much smaller temple than the previous two, especially Angkor Wat. I did not spend more than 15 minutes here.
Don't get me wrong, it was a very interesting site. There just wasn't a lot of ground to cover.
After I returned to my tuk tuk I asked my driver about food. He took me to a restaurant set up specifically for Angkor temples tourists. I wasn't sure what to expect, but ended up getting a chance to sample Lok Lak, which was one of the local dishes recommended to me earlier by somebody Cambodian.
Lok Lak is basically a bunch of beef pieces smothered in sauce, on a bed of lettuce, with tomatoes, onions, and rice on the side. This particular version had french fries in the mix as well, so the whole thing really reminded me of Peru's
Lomo Soltado. The sauce and the seasonings were not really that similar, but most of the visible ingredients were.
Cambodian cuisine was definitely surprising me, although to be honest I did not really know much about it beforehand. The only expectations I had going in were that it was going to be similar to Thai food, which it sort of wasn't. Not nearly as much as I thought it was going to be anyway.