Clamber Over Angkor Wat While You Still Can - Road to the Middle Class

SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA — You haven’t lived until you have seen the gigantic rush hours at Siem Reap, the closest town to the monster palace and temple complex at Angkor Wat.

In 2005 they booked 1.5 million visitors to Angkor Wat, and this year they are predicting 2 million.

In consequence the sleepy village of Siem Reap has got itself an airport with a spanking new international terminal, and a permanent construction zone in which over 80 tourist hotels have been built in the last few years.

When the tourists are heading out of their hotels for the temple complex at 8:30 am, you can visualize the torrent of buses and Toyota mini-vans.

And when the tourists get to the ruins... Prepare to be shocked.

We westerners, trained to worship the environment before we even get out of diapers, expect to be firmly roped off from fragile ruins.

In our US National Parks we are used to the slow and relentless project to confine us to the road, or the trail, or the bus. Because if we stepped off the trail we would irreversibly damage the fragile ecology—of the alpine meadow, or the arid desert, or the cultural heritage of the adobe village—and that would never do.

But not at Angkor Wat. At least not yet.

They do have ropes up to stop you from fingering the amazing 150 foot long bas-relief of the monkey god Hanuman’s battle with the demon king.

But you can clamber over pretty well everything else, at least for now.

You’d better get on an airplane and get out here real soon. Because the euro-snots will pretty soon decide that ordinary people need to be kept off the sacred precincts—where only accredited researchers ought to tread.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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