Talk:West Baray

Better Pictures, Please ; Other Suggestions

Wow, West Baray is one of the biggest man-made things of pre-1500 times, made without steam or gasoline power. Can someone use Google Maps and get better pictures of it ? I lived there for 6 months teaching English, and biked around it a number of times (very sandy, at some points in its North-East I needed to ask local boys for the way), and swam in it a couple times, too. (But I never took those boats out to the temple because it just never came together. You have to come at the right time to haggle prices, and wait, and have money, etc. But I visited a bunch of minor temples out in the country nearby and on the other side of the Baray, good times.)

Can you give a conversion into miles because Americans can't imagine kilometers that well, even Cross-Country runners or former ones ? 4.8 by 1.3 miles.

I should come back here and include a translation of its name in Old Khmer. I'm not sure if we have it. We know what "reservoir" was, and the name of "Angkor Wat", but not this one. West Baray is almost better than the temples because it's so huge. My students told me when it got dry you could see skeletons from Pol Pot's Reign of Terror, but those brats were probably pulling my leg. But you might be able to see some outlines of some of the lost cities on its bottom. Unfortunately, the year I was there, 2010-2011, it didn't get that dry.

More Americans should fork over a couple thousand and get out there, it's a good learning experience. Surrounded by rice paddies and Indian-like music blaring from village loud speakers, it's still like the Capitol of Southeast-Asia.

The best swimming place is at the SW corner of Angkor Thom, though. West Mebon is nice on a hot day, but a bit huge and scary for swimming, in my own opinion. There's 3 creepy, sometimes-flooded tunnels which locals pass through twice daily on wood-foraging trips in Angkor Thom's jungle ; they go underneath the massive walls of Angkor Thom and open onto an old sandbar the locals use to cross the moat of Angkor Thom.

People complain so much about too many tourists, but if you'd rent a bike for a dollar and bring a helmet, you could skip the crowds by either planning your visit time of year OR using a guide you can find there to know when the crowds go where. Because there's so many Asians (and Europeans led by Asians) everyone goes the same places at the same time like robots.

I recommend staying at least a week or two, because even if the temples are all very similar, climbing them and swimming in the rivers and biking through the jungles is fun. Unfortunately, a lot of the travelers are seniors. I wish they'd send their kids, but Westerners don't have many of them these days. I miss that place but the nearest affordable decent hospital is in Bangkok and the pay is not so ambitious.

The best thought out there today on West Baray is that it was an irrigation reservoir foremost. These ideas about it being built for symbolic purposes are bizaare and comical. It's for storing rain for the dry season; they had a lot of people living in the capital back then and they needed food, food, food, the word being a close cognate of "rice" in Southeast Asian languages. If someone could lean the article toward that view, it would be great. But there's so much neat archaeology on West Baray, if me or someone else could dig it up and put it in here, that would be great.

Rich kids and Oliver Twist kids in Cambodia probably look up the Wikipedia article in hopes of learning some English and knowing something they can use to get tourists to flip them a wink and a shiny new quarter. "Sir, where are you from [Suh, wai-ruh yoo fruhm] ?" "America." "Capitol : Washington DC. [Kae-pih-tahl : Wah-shin-tin dee see]." "Good, kid, here's a couple bucks." "Bah-rahng chah-poy! [Stupid foreigner!] "

Dwarfkingdom (talk) 09:03, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Wrong picture in infobox

The picture used in infobox is not from West Baray. It is from Srah Srang. Pablo000 (talk) 12:09, 18 April 2023 (UTC)