Detour: Stone Temple Pilot

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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.