From Filipina on Flip Flops: Travel Tales and the City Life of a Filipina

There it was, the temple complex of Angkor Wat, its “beehive” towers standing ever so proudly yet solemnly in the middle of the forest of Siem Reap, as it has done so for centuries. Other than how immense it was, I was taken by its location, hidden deep in the woods, forgotten and untouched, its existence unknown to the outside world for years and years. I wondered what it must’ve felt like for the French explorer who re-discovered Angkor in the 1800s, to have found all that grandeur and to have undoubtedly been flabbergasted by the staggering thought that a place as massive and as beautiful as that could’ve been forgotten almost entirely by civilization. And while Angkor Wat and the rest of Cambodia’s temples are now renowned all over the world and are visited by crowds of tourists each year, on that quiet, wet and gloomy Sunday morning, standing on the bridge towards its entrance, I couldn’t help but feel incredibly fortunate to have been part of, and to have seen for myself, the “hidden” magnificence that is Angkor Wat.

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