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 kilometers southeast of Angkor Wat. Although the city's other buildings are gone, several temples remain, including pretty, plastered Preah Ko and imposing Bakong, which rises like a pyramid on an island in the middle of a perfectly square moat. (Those temples are now called the Rolous Group after a nearby river.) Bakong is also home to a thriving Buddhist temple (or "pagoda") that is a center of the rural community around it. (While we were sorting these pictures on a laptop in a cafe in Siem Reap, a young waiter spotted a picture of the temple and exclaimed with delight "That's my pagoda." He proceeded to tell us about the times he spent there as a child and about the changes that his grandfather, who is 86, has seen in that area over his lifetime.)
