For our second real day of temple sightseeing, we went back to the early days of the Khmer empire—to the late 800s, when the capital was at a place called Hariharalaya, about 15 km southeast of Angkor Wat. Although the city’s other buildings are gone, a few temples remain, including pretty, plastered Preah Ko (shown above) and imposing pyramid-shaped Bakong. (Those temples are now called the Rolous Group after a nearby river.)

Bakong is also home to a Buddhist temple (or “pagoda”) and monastery that are a center of the rural community around them. While we were sorting the pictures in the Angkor Temples 2 gallery on a laptop in a cafe in Siem Reap, a young waiter spotted a picture of the monastery and exclaimed with delight, “That’s my pagoda.” He proceeded to tell us about the times he spent there as a child and all of the changes that his grandfather, who is 86, has seen in that area over his lifetime.
