This headline gives me the heebie jeebies. Cambodia tops my list of fantasy travel destinations (w/ Tibet) (okay, and Nepal, Antarctica, and a top-to-bottom overland tour of Africa) and has for years because I would love to see its treasures before they're looted, trampled, or otherwise disappeared.
Why Is Everybody Going to Cambodia?
JUST after Christmas in 1859, the French explorer Henri Mouhot left Bangkok to explore the uncharted regions of Indochina. It took him a year of hacking through brush and fending off leopards, leeches and wild elephants before he arrived at Angkor Wat, the jungle-smothered complex of temples deep inside the kingdom of Cambodia. Less than two years later, he died of malaria.
What took Mouhot a year can now be accomplished in little more than an hour, via Bangkok Airways' seven daily flights from the Thai capital to Siem Reap, home base for Angkor expeditions. Mouhot may have had to trudge three hours down a sandy path through dense forest to reach the ruins, but 21st-century visitors have the luxury of everything from tuk-tuks to Land Cruisers to an AS-350 Squirrel helicopter.
And while Mouhot lamented the temples' abandonment, today they are such popular tourist attractions that the measure of an expert Angkor guide is not his knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, nor his mastery of English, French and Japanese, but his ability to show visitors the most popular sites - the Bayon, Phnom Bakheng, Ta Prohm and Angkor Wat itself - and have them wondering, at day's end, "Where was everybody else?"
As much as I would give to travel to and in Cambodia, I don't think I could in good conscience travel there unless it were under the auspices of an eco-tourism outfit. And still, is that enough? I'd also love to hang out w/ Jane Goodall, but do gorillas really need my selfish ass trampling all through their habitat and interrupting their lives? Maybe television is good for something and we should stay home and watch these things on the Discovery Channel? Heck.
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