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In Kampong Cham we visit the Twin Holy Mountains Phnom Pros & Phnom Seri (Man and Woman Hill).

One of the things that intrigued me about the temples at the Twin Holy Mountains was to visualize here just how the temples at Angkor must have looked when they were first built, with lots of color, and exquisite detail.

I really liked the painted stone statues. It seemed to bring them to life.

As we entered the temple we had to remove our shoes. I wondered if Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Somoni had been here, and painted the ceiling of this temple, as he did the Sistine Chapel ceiling. ;o) Just kidding.

The altar was quite beautiful. A priest (or monk) was there to read a prayer (or prophecy) to you, I’m not sure which it was.

He would hand you his stack of prayer cards, which you held over your head and stuck a sharp stick blindly into the side of the stack, selecting your prayer. The monk would then read it to you, in Cambodian of course, and our guide would interpret.

The temples were very beautiful, with lots of gold leaf, and very well cared for, and the gardens were magnificent.

Those 9 headed serpents were everywhere. It must have been a stone cutters nightmare, carving all those scales on the serpents bodies, if that’s how it was done.

It was a long stairway from the temple down to the garden, where colorful statues were in abundance.

Tin was very good about capturing us on his digital camera, which he put on a disc and gave one to each of us at the end.

You can see the sanitary lotion bottles in Tin’s back pack. He was great about keeping us sanitized and healthy. Those little critters were also in abundance on the grounds, but you didn’t dare get too close to them, as they were known to bite tourists.

There were other beautiful temples in the gardens. And the gilded buddhas in various poses were amazing.

Pete seems to have the photographer’s eye. I liked this first photo with the close up of the maiden in the garden with the huge head facing the four cardinal points in the background. Also, I think this is the first horse I’ve seen, but perhaps I just wasn’t paying much attention, if there were others.

Our guide removed his shoes even to stand on the highly polished floor of this outdoor shrine. A pond had some beautiful water lilies that added a nice color to the garden.

I did not notice the strangeness of this staircase until I reviewed my photos. Gold on one side and white on the other, including the praying monks. I’d like to know the symbolism it is meant to represent. Perhaps Tin can enlighten me.

That huge stone head which faced in four directions was colossal. It must have been more than 30 feet tall atop the temple.

The temple in the first frame below was off all by itself, and there were weeds growing up around it. Its stone work was beautifully carved, and I wondered why it appeared to be abandoned. I was curious regarding its original purpose.

The shrine in the second frame above was a memorial to those who were killed during the horrible times when nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s seven million people died under the rule of Pol Pot, at the hands of his Khmer Rouge followers. We will be visiting the killing fields on a later shore excursion. In the next chapter, however, we will be visiting an orphanage, a village, and the Udon Monastery.