After a good night’s sleep at the Golden Temple Villa, we are ready for another day of temple exploration. The plan was to wake up early to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat. However, we overslept again and missed it again. We will have only one more chance before we leave Cambodia.
Our driver and guide was already downstairs waiting for us. It was still early in the morning so we asked him to bring us to a place for breakfast. We took the tuk-tuk and he brought us there. It was at the place was had lunch before – Raksmie Bopha Angkor. Somehow something smells fishy.
Anyway we ordered our breakfast, which was actually more western oriented than Cambodian. One was ham and eggs and the other was omelette. There was nothing special about the food. How different can you make ham and eggs anyway?
After breakfast, we had a few minutes to explore the area. The restaurant is beside the immense Sra Srang. The Sra Srang is a huge man-made lake built by the ancient Khmers to collect water. These lakes are called barays. The barays are used by the Khmers to collect water and irrigate the surrounding plains. It is fed mostly by the Siem Reap river and some of the water is even diverted to fill up moats.
The interesting fact about the barays is that it used gravity to control the water. One part of the baray is actually slightly higher than the other side, so naturally the water will flow down to the lower side. It is through this process that the water of the barays is maintained.
Huge as the Sra Srang was, the Khmers built even more collossal barays. One is the West Baray and the other is the East Baray. Now the East Baray is dry. But the West Baray is still three fourths full. It is truly mind boggling on how these ancient people managed to construct something this big. The West Baray measures eight kilometers long and two kilometers wide. Truly collossal. To better appreciate the size of these barays, you can look at Google maps and zoom out several times, the huge rectangular areas north of the Sra Srang is the East Baray. Compared to the East Baray, the Sra Srang looks like a tiny rectangle below it. To the west of Angkor Thom is the even bigger West Baray. Surely there are only a few man made structures on earth that can compare in size to these barays.
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