National Museum

The National Museum is across a little square from teh back of the Royal Palace. It is a gorgeous, traditional looking building set in gardens.

The building itself, and the gardens, are lovely, and almost worth a trip themselves. But you are, of course, there for the Angkor empire art. A lot of it has been brought south from the temple complexes at Angkor, to try to preserve something from looters. A highlight is the Leper King himself, retrieved from the leper king's terrace and replaced with a replica so that he wouldn't get stolen.

There is older art and good explanations, in English and French, of what the art is. There were particularly fascinating buddhas, and a chance to burn incense at some of the more intact statues of Buddha or some of the hindu gods. There are also some interesting displays on archeology and the science of guessing what people died of from their skeletons, all of which is pretty well done.

I don't have many photos, because they ask you not to take pictures and I respected that.

Apparently, the museum is home to a large colony of bats. I wanted to go see them all take off at dusk, but the weather was fowl and I thought that even bats would probably stay home in that rain.

Well worth a trip.

Before lunch we visited the National Museum, which was filled to the rim with statues and other examples of (mostly Angkorian) Khmer art. Interesting to walk through and see the remarkable mixture of Hinduism, Ramayana and Buddhism on display, but not something I'd personally spend hours exploring. The building itself and it's central garden were though. A nice moment of rest in a moving day.