Tag: historical site

North Gallery, Angkor Wat Temple

After walking to the big open area in the center of the main Angkor Wat temple, this stunning building, which cannot be seen from inside the temple, is off to the left (with the temple entrance at your back) and through a couple of doors. In front of where I stood to take this photo, there is stairway down to the grass area. I found a map of the Angkor Wat temple complex online that labelled this structure the North Gallery. That name does not really reveal what the function of this building was.

Angkor Wat Temple, Cambodia

I just spent a week in Siem Reap (Cambodia) and this gave me a chance to revisit some of the sites that are part of the vast Angkor Wat temple complex just outside of the city. Angkor is a truly magical, awe-inspiring place. I was with my brother visiting from the US on my first trip in 2018 – we hired a licensed guide and heard a great deal about the temples we visited. How much of this was part of the historical record and how much was fanciful is for someone other than me to know. In any case for this visit, I teamed up with my friend Ansel living in Siem Reap these days. We dispensed with a guide in favor of our cameras. We walked and climbed around several temples and shot a lot of photos, only a few of which, in my case, will see the light of day.

On our first day out, we headed for the main Angkor Wat temple, arriving before six in the morning, hoping to get one of those iconic images of the sun rising behind the famous domes of the main temple. Instead, we got a mostly cloudy sky with a bit of patchy sunshine. The light was actually lovely, but there were no sunrise shots, much less spectacular ones.

The image here spent a good deal of time in the digital darkroom. The sun was behind and to the right of the entrance way to the temple. The original raw file showed the foreground temple building in deep, almost black, shadow against a washed out, almost white, sky in the background. Fortunately raw files allow significant adjustments of shadow and highlight areas without compromising image quality beyond repair – I shoot all raw for this reason. There are, however, limits to what even a raw file can take, and this image is at the borderline. The front of the temple has a lot of digital noise to the detriment of clear, sharp details. But for a small, compressed jpeg image, quality is still acceptable.

Guangzhao Assembly Hall, Hoi An

In the past, this hall and several other assembly halls served as meeting places for Chinese traders and other Chinese living in Hoi An. Completed in 1885, the Guangzhao Assembly Hall was built well after Hoi An had passed its heyday as a major trading center along the Vietnamese coast. While some of the assembly halls served Chinese from particular parts of China, this hall was open to all members of the Chinese community in Hoi An.

Japanese Bridge, Hoi An Old Town

The Japanese Bridge is probably the best known and definitely the most popular attraction in the Hoi An Old Town. When times are normal and the Old Town is crowded with tourists, the bridge is packed with people from morning well into the evening. Of course, these are not normal times. At 6:30 am on a recent Tuesday morning, there was not a soul in the frame when I took this shot. Though a couple of morning joggers passed through the bridge as I approached with my camera.

If one searches the Japanese Bridge in English, several travel sites provide colorful information about the site, with each site offering brief and rather different tales of the bridge’s origin and history.

I eventually found a Vietnamese language entry on the Vietnamese version of Wikipedia and made my way slowly – very slowly and with the help of Google Translate – through what it had to say. I arbitrarily decided this page written by a Vietnamese was more likely to be accurate than the fairy tales being fed to English speaking tourists. In any case, the bridge was built in the 17th century by Japanese traders. At the time, Hoi An was an important trading port on the coastal routes connecting China and Japan with SE Asia and India and the Arab Middle East beyond. The city housed resident communities of foreign merchants from several locales. One website speculates that Japanese built the bridge to facilitate contact with the Chinese merchant community on the other side of the waterway.

The bridge has been renovated or restored several times during its more than 300 year history. The Vietnamese information says that many of the original Japanese style features and decorations on the bridge have been replaced with Vietnamese and Chinese motifs.