Detour: Stone Temple Pilot

Are you Lilliputian in stature? Or too tight, perhaps, to fork out the $20 required to spend a day communing with the spirits of ancient Khmer Kings? Then maybe the other Angkor Wat is for you.

That's right, there are two. There is, of course, the Angkor Wat that has graced a million postcards, with its soaring stone towers, its lily-strewn moat, its bas-reliefs and labyrinths, its babel of tourists and silky-tongued touts who can con you in five languages. And then there's the Angkor Wat in Dy Proeung's front yard.

"I don't know why I built it. It was just something I had to do," says the aging artist, tel: (855-12) 686642, who has transformed his property in Siem Reap's Quartier Slokram into a kind of Khmer Field of Dreams. "My wife thinks I'm nuts, and so do the neighbors."

There's also a pint-size replica in his yard of the pink sandstone splendor of Banteay Srei, and Dy has begun work on his own version of the multi-faced towers of Bayon. But it's his Angkor Wat that takes center stage, drawing the most oohs and aahs from the trickle of visitors who each fork out $1 for a look.

He built it in 1984, casting it in concrete at a scale of 2 cm to 1 m. "I know every nook and cranny of the (real) place," he says, and it's no idle boast. Dy, 66, was part of a team of artists that drew up complete architectural blueprints of Angkor Wat in 1969 for the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient research organization. Those blueprints are proudly displayed on a wall in his workshop, along with an award from Cambodia's King Norodom Sihanouk in recognition of his work as an artist. In a visitors' book, one tourist rates this alternative Angkor "better than the helicopter trip to the real thing."

"I suppose you could call it a magnificent obsession," says Dy, whose Bayon project is currently on hold. He is, he explains, stone-broke.

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