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HISTORY OF BIG SUR COAST

  A new dawn:              Locals had long called for a road along the coast to aid shipwreck victims and improve access to isolated communities.  Construction started in 1919, and 18 years, 32 tonnes of dynamite and 33 bridges later, the Big Sur stretch of California Highway One was complete.               The implausible route, with its myriad twists and turns and dramatic drop-offs, became an instant classic.  The author and painter Henry Miller fled to Big Sur in 1944 and stayed for nearly two decades.  Photographer Edward Weston and Beat Generation bard Jack Kerouac fell under its spell.  By the late 1960’s San Francisco’s counterculture revolution had swept down to Big Sur, and the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell performed on the cliff tops.              ...
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ANGKOR WAT

 

Angkor Wat:

Angkor Wat


                       Monumental, perfectly symmetrical, Angkor Wat rises from the plain, an iconic ‘temple mountain’ built by mortals to please the gods.

                        The first sight of Angkor Wat is a heart-stopping moment, its appearance changing throughout the day – now bathed in a soft golden glow, now burning in the midday sun, or draped, stark and awesome, in deepening shadows.  Sunsets are hauntingly beautiful, sending shivers down the spine as towers and turrets glow coppery gold in the shadow of Bakheng Hill where the city of Angkor was built.  A sandstone causeway leads across a wide moat sprinkled with lotus to an entrance in the outer wall, whose golden – coloured towers and colonnades are reflected in the still water.  Orange-robed monks meditate in quiet corners.  The past seem to cling to the old stones here.

                          Widely acclaimed by scholars as the pinnacle of classical Khmer architecture, this vast temple complex – generally acknowledged as the world’s largest religious structure – ranks as one of South-east Asia’s leading religious sites.  It is just one of several hundred temples that was built in Angkor between the 9th and 15th centuries, when the region served as the seat of the Khmer Empire.

                            With the decline of the empire from the 15th century onwards, the temples became abandoned, haunted only by holy men.  The moat surrounding Angkor Wat  probably protected the temple from being swallowed up by the fast-encroaching rain forest.  Many smaller temples nearby were wholly or partially buried in dense undergrowth, while this, the grandest of them all, remained remarkably well preserved.  Used first as a Hindu temple, then later as a Buddhist shrine, the complex survived both pilfering by locals and the ravages of time.

                              Although Portuguese travellers came upon the site in the 16th century, Angkor Wat did not attract world attention until French explorer Henri Mouhot published his travel tale  Voyage a Siam et dans le Cambodge in the 1860s.  Today it is a World Heritage Site and a major tourist attraction – it is estimated that half of all foreign visitors to Cambodia come here.

Location: Krong Siem Reap, Cambodia

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