Of all the sights to behold on earth, few can compare to sunrise over Angkor Wat: the first rays of dawn beaming down over those legendary spires...the hoots of monkeys from the surrounding jungle...the hushed awe of visitors...the industrial blue glow of hundreds of cell phones.
Yes, progress has come to this once-quiet corner of Southeast Asia, now booming with not only a crush of visitors but also construction of new hotels at a pace that Las Vegas and Orlando would envy. I would never tell anyone how to run things in their country--after all, I’m an American--but as I walked the streets of Siem Reap, the gateway to the Angkor archaeological complex, I found myself hoping that the Cambodians know what they’re getting themselves into, hoping that they’ll be able to preserve their character and uniqueness where so many have failed.
Since the travel industry became the world’s largest, there has been a rush to moron-proof every major tourist attraction in said world. The upside is that with a few clicks of a mouse, it's now possible to visit almost every fascinating world wonder with relative ease. The downside of moron-proofing travel is that, well, you unleash the morons.
Siem Reap is a charming little town, with a pristine, gleaming new international airport. I would say that it's nicer than my hometown airport of LAX, but that's not saying much. Indiana Jones being chased by spear-chucking Jovitos Indians and leaping into a snake-infested seaplane is a better experience than LAX.
But by any comparison, Angkor International is a very impressive and reasonably efficient airport, even if there is something a little unsettling about an air traffic control tower that climbs higher than the tallest surviving spire of the Khmer empire. And I'm not here to begrudge the people of Siem Reap (Siem Reapers?) the right to cash in on the tourism boom. They're hardly the only ones.
The Peruvians have talked about building a tram to the top of Machu Picchu, which is too bad because riding that rickety bus along those dusty death-defying hairpin turns is one of the world's last great true adventures. And as part of their Olympics-heightened building boom, the Chinese want to pave a ten-lane freeway to the Base Camp of Mount Everest. An old traveling buddy just emailed me photos of his three-week trek to the shadow of Everest’s Khumbu Icefall; a freeway makes that feat roughly akin to a rush-hour drive to San Bernardino. Dangerous and foolhardy in its own way, but not quite rare.
So of course Cambodia is no different than anywhere else; they know you want to visit and they are going to make a buck in the process. Good for them--as long as my wildly overpaying for a cheap stone carving helps improve the overall welfare of the area. I don’t mind being a dupe for a good cause (as mentioned, I am an American). I just don't happen to find poverty fascinating, and as naive as it may sound, I do believe in tourism's power to transform villages and countries for the better. I also, however, believe in its power to really mess things up pretty badly.
Right up to the stone walls of Angkor Wat and its adjacent complexes of Angkor Thom, where those iconic visages gaze out with stately grace and hawkers sell black market copies of Lonely Planet Cambodia for a dollar (or roughly 1/27th of what the regular 'Backpackers Bible' sells for), the ongoing transformation is evident. The hawkers, guides, and I think even a few monkeys carry cell phones and have web sites. But despite that improved technology, you can’t help but notice how many of the kids in the shadow of the awesome monuments don't have shoes. Or clothes. Or clean water.
It's like traveling backwards a thousand years in a five-minute walk: you go from some of the most stunning, advanced, sophisticated designs mankind has ever achieved, to primitive, squalid conditions right outside the gate. It's like going from Manhattan to New Jersey.
By all means, a visit to Angkor Wat is worth the trip; it's worth a hundred trips. And you’ll never find friendlier and more accommodating people than Cambodians (even if a trip to a Killing Fields monument indicates a few exceptions). The monuments and the jungle are beautiful, the people even more so, and, at least for the time being, Siem Reap is managing to hang on to some of the character that first made it a traveling destination decades ago. I can only hope it stays that way.
I just don't want to travel halfway across the world to find a place where tacky consumerism has overrun the place, where all the character has been squeezed out in the name of the almighty buck and every street corner looks like all the rest. I've already visited that place. It's called home.
