RETURN of the LOST CITY

The jungle air was hot and humid and the sweat streamed down our arms. Our fingers left wet marks on the sandstone as we admired an exquisitely carved apsara. Eight hundred years of monsoon rains had somehow not aged this celestial dancer. Her seductive charms had been perfectly preserved in the embrace of the jungle.

We explored tall temple-palaces, elaborately carved galleries, elevated courtyards and mysterious passageways. Gigantic guardian figures lined bridges crossing ancient moats. Immense stone faces, with their enigmatic smiles, gazed down on us from dozens of gateways and towers. Giant kapok and strangler figs still straddled some of the temples, but dozens more temples had been cleared and reconstructed and were easily accessible.

Over five centuries, powerful god-kings built their successive capitals here employing the finest artisans. What they left behind in northern Cambodia has a romantic mystique unrivaled by any place in Southeast Asia. This lost city in the jungle is a fantasy land straight out of “Indiana Jones.”

Last spring, before July’s bloody civil unrest, Cambodia seemed relatively stable and Angkor was back on the tourist circuit again. So my traveling companion, Maria, and I decided to visit the ruins for the second time. We were pleasantly surprised at the dramatic improvements since our first visit in 1994. Tourist amenities such as hotels and restaurants had doubled, roads had improved, and both monuments and visitors were being better managed.

On our most recent visit, we were amazed at the number of tourists. Parked on the dirt parking lot in front of the causeway at Angkor Wat, the best-known monument in a 77-square-mile area, were 20 tour buses, 50 cars and 100 motorbikes.

Three years before, this on-again, off-again wonder of the world--which tourism officials of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) see as potentially the largest single draw in Southeast Asia for overseas visitors--was not quite on-again. Hardly a dozen tourists then could be found among all the ruins. We regularly had the temples completely to ourselves. But there were drawbacks too.

On that first visit, we set off alone on our rented motorbike for Banteay Srei, a set of diminutive but exquisite Khmer temples isolated in the jungle about 15 miles northeast of Angkor Wat. Everyone cautioned us about driving the dirt road.

The road deteriorated soon after we left the main temple area. The jungle thinned, turned into rice paddies and, as luck had it, just as we passed a small “WARNING! MINES!” sign (displaying a red and black skull and crossbones), deep muddy water forced us on a quarter-mile detour along what we sincerely hoped was a footpath.

It took us an hour and a half to reach the Banteay Srei temples. Half a dozen ragged young soldiers, one with a missing leg, checked our tickets, then offered to sell us postcards.

But for our trouble we had this “gem of Angkor” entirely to ourselves. Exquisite carvings covered every inch of sandstone, as pink and perfect as the day they were chiseled in 967.

During our nearly two-hour visit, no one bothered to check on us. Unchaperoned, and wanting close-up photos, I (very carefully) lifted spider webs with my pencil from the brittle flutings of tiny 1,000-year-old carvings. I recalled thinking, “They shouldn’t allow tourists to do this.”

Only once did we bump into the old temple cleaner. He pointed with his bamboo broom to a freshly broken head. “Khmer Rouge” he said, clicking his tongue in reference to the feared Cambodian rebels that once terrorized the country.

When we returned for our most recent visit, teams had cleared the mines to far out into the countryside, the Khmer Rouge were a thing of the past. Air-conditioned vans now made the trip to Banteay Srei on a smoothly surfaced road in 20 minutes.

Located about 200 miles northwest of Phnom Penh in the jungle flatland between the Kulen Hills (where Angkor’s stones were quarried) and Tonle Sap Lake, these artful ruins have attracted archeologists, travelers and art thieves since news of their discovery by French explorers in the mid-1800s.

Between the 9th and 14th centuries, Angkor was the capital of the Khmers, who created the largest empire in Southeast Asia. King Jayavarman II united this civilization in 802 and implemented Devaraja, the cult in which the king was worshiped as a god on Earth (first as the Hindu god Siva or Vishnu, or, later, as Buddha).

Each successive ruler built a capital city around his own temple, complete with canals to irrigate the rice fields that fed Angkor’s population, nearly a million people at its height in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The Thais finally sacked Angkor in 1431. Gold was stripped from the stone towers, jewels and silk tapestries were looted and the city was left deserted. The jungle quickly swallowed Angkor up. It wasn’t rediscovered until 1860 when a missionary first lead the French zoologist-explorer Henri Mouhot to Angkor. Expeditions soon arrived and what they found astonished the world. One member of an 1874 expedition took 70 sculptures back with him to France. The world’s romance with Angkor’s stones, and the looting of its temples, had begun.

Today the Angkor archeological district covers 120 square miles and contains 72 accessible sites. (Satellite photos now reveal more sites yet to be explored). Paved lanes link the temples, and conservation efforts are overseen by APSARA, a nongovernmental group that also helps protect the monuments from further damage by tourists. (Angkor only became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.)

From the hotels and guest houses of the tiny town of Siem Reap, it is only three miles to the park entrance where guards check your temple ticket.

In 1994, we were free to drive ourselves around the ruins on a rented motorbike. New APSARA regulations, however, require hired drivers for both cars and motorbikes. At first we thought this an imposition, but quickly came to appreciate our two patient motorbike drivers who knew the whereabouts of every temple. Each motorbike and driver cost us $6 a day (a car with driver cost $20).

From the park entrance, the road continues on through a towering forest until suddenly the first gray stones of Angkor Wat rise up isolated behind a wide lotus-filled moat in the jungle. Angkor Wat (wat means temple) is the most famous of the Cambodian temples; the title is often mistakenly used to identify the entire Angkor site. Built between 1113 and 1150, it was the funerary temple for King Suryavarman II and symbolizes heaven on Earth.

Looking down the causeway that crosses the wide moat, the five central towers (the tallest at 213 feet) of the main temple are nearly hidden behind the surrounding galleries. Estimated to contain the same cubic volume of stone blocks as Egypt’s pyramid of Cheops, it is the largest temple of any kind in the world, and the best preserved in Angkor.

Covering its walls are about 1,700 nearly life-size apsaras. These voluptuous ladies, clad in diaphanous skirts, represent heavenly bliss. Thousands more can be found among the other ruins.

Thirty years ago, a large luxury hotel stood where refreshment stands now sell Coke ($1), Tiger beer ($1) and coconut juice (40 cents). Angkor hosted 70,000 tourists a year in 1968. Then in 1970, civil war broke out in Cambodia and for nearly a quarter-century Angkor was sealed off from the world. Although both Cambodian political factions claimed Angkor as their Khmer heritage and agreed to fight their battles elsewhere, the ruins suffered from neglect and ongoing looting.

From Angkor Wat we headed north and soon reached the south gate of Angkor Thom (“the great city”). The massive walls and moat of Angkor Thom enclose six square miles, encompassing dozens of sites.

The Bayon temple, built in 1200, sits in the very middle. Its 54 lotus-shaped towers, each with four massive faces, change with every angle of sunlight. One moment it’s a melting mass of stone, the next moment it comes alive with smiling faces. The bas-reliefs on the walls reveal early Cambodian history.

We drove past the Elephant Terrace, with its near life-size carved elephants, and headed east for Ta Prohm, which, like Angkor Wat, lies outside the city of Angkor Thom.

Our drivers waited with their motorbikes in the shade. We wandered (glancing now and again at a guidebook) through the rambling ruins of the 12th century monastery.

Ta Prohm is especially bewitching. It is one of the sites archeologists have purposely left much as they were first found, overgrown by jungle. Dim vaulted galleries sagged under the weight of growing trees. Immense roots both pried apart the stones and stitched them together again. Stray beams of sunlight revealed beautiful carved apsaras hidden behind the trunks of trees. Even the headless Buddhas seemed appropriate. But the jungle doesn’t take heads. People do.

*

The periodic political troubles in Cambodia have contributed to the art theft. Much of this looted art crosses the border into Thailand where it evidently acquires legal status. In 1994, in an upscale gift shop in Bangkok’s venerable Oriental Hotel, we saw a 3-foot-high Khmer statue from Cambodia.

The proprietor, who admitted it was from Cambodia, told us that the price ($10,000) included “all necessary antiquity export permits.”

Odds are, that Khmer statue was not from Angkor, but from an outlying site. Such pieces disappeared from Angkor long ago, though not all were stolen. Some are in the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Others are stored at Angkor Conservation’s sculpture depot just off the road to the ruins. APSARA officials told us that looting at Angkor was no longer the problem it once was. The real danger to the monuments now were the tourists.

“Cambodia welcomes [tourists] because it wants their money,” one APSARA official told us, “but tourists are wearing away the sandstone monuments. Soon we will ask them to wear soft shoes.”

APSARA officials rely on a 500-member “heritage police” force and in the future plan to build welcome centers, offer orientation videos and implement strict tourist controls.

Returning through the park after a long hot day, we noticed the afternoon sunlight catching the enigmatic smile of one of Angkor’s famous giant stone faces in a magical way.

It was a photo opportunity, and we told our drivers to pull off into the shade.

A minivan soon parked alongside and several European tourists climbed out with their cameras. Apparently (as we couldn’t help but overhear), their first day had been memorable. “When I was growing up,” one of the women said, gazing at the monumental face of Jayavarman VII in the likeness of the smiling Buddha, “everyone wanted to see these ruins. Back then, you never heard of Thailand. It was all Angkor. . . .”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: Angkor Away

Getting there: There are daily flights to Siem Reap from Bangkok, Thailand, on Bangkok Airways; round-trip fare is $362. To Bangkok from LAX, Thai Airways flies direct (no change of planes) and JAL, United, Northwest and Cathay Pacific have connecting service; round-trip fares begin at $1,187.

Where to stay: Two choices on the airport road are Hotel Nokor Kok Thlok (tel. 011-855-63-963-505, fax 011-855-63-380-022; doubles about $95) and Nokor Phnom Hotel (tel. 011-855-63-380-106, fax 011-855-63-380-033; standard rooms $100 to $130.) In Siem Reap, the Angkor Village Hotel (tel. 011-855-15-916-048, e-mail angkor.village@worldmail.com.kh), built in the traditional Khmer style, has a good restaurant; room with fan, $45; with air-conditioning, $60. For luxury, the Grand Hotel d’Angkor (reservations, tel. [800] 525-4800 or 011-855-63-963-888, fax 963-168. Our favorite among Siem Reap’s inexpensive guest houses is Mom’s (no tel.); $6-$10 per room, some with baths.

Tours: Among Asia specialists who put together all-inclusive tours of Angkor from Bangkok are Geographic Expeditions (tel. [800] 777-8183, fax [415] 346-5535; five-day tours start at $1,250 per person); Distant Horizons (tel. [800] 333-1240 or (562) 983-8828, fax (562) 982-8833; five-day tours from $1,140) and Asia Transpacific Journeys (tel. [800] 642-2742, fax [303] 443-7078; four days from $1,000). One of Bangkok’s many travel agencies can also arrange tours.

The Angkor tourist office can arrange temple tours and guides. Tickets to the Angkor temple complex are $20 per day.