1 REDISCOVER THE TEMPLES OF ANGKOR
When all the votes were counted, it was clear that the number-one sight in Lonely Planet’s ‘Ultimate Travelist’ had won by a landslipe. So, how did Angkor Wat do it? Even in a region as gifted with temples as Southeast Asia, Angkor Wat is something out of the ordinary: an image of heaven on Earth, hewn from thousands of stone blocks and carved foor-to-ceiling with legends from Hindu epics. Even better, Angkor Wat is the crowning glory in a complex of more than a thousand Hindu and Buddhist temples, shrines and tombs that forms a virtual city of spires in the jungles of Cambodia. International fights drop into nearby Siem Reap, so it’s hard to describe Angkor as ‘undiscovered’, yet every visitor who steps among the ruins, where tree roots tear through ancient walls and the heads of forgotten deities poke out from between the vines, feels like an adventurer peeling back the foliage for the first time. Few experiences can match arriving at the ruins of the Bayon at dawn and watching dozens of benevolent stone faces appearing slowly out of the mist like heavenly apparitions. Angkor Wat itself is a massive representation of the sacred Mt Meru, executed with such grace that it might have been made in the presence of the divine. Travellers feel similar emotions when exploring the overgrown 12th-century ruins of Ta Prohm (pictured). Angkor is a powerful reminder of the ambitions of human creativity, and the very Buddhist realisation that nothing material is eternal, and that given time, all will be reclaimed by the jungle.