Temple crumbles amid tourism rise

Cambodia peace opens floodgates

About 1 million tourists are expected to visit Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple this year. The heavy traffic is damaging the complex, with parts of it ready to topple, conservationists say. (Paul Watson/Los Angeles Times)

ANGKOR, Cambodia - The ancient sandstone temples of Angkor have stood up to endless assaults down the centuries, from medieval raiders armed with clubs and spears to genocidal looters laying land mines.

These days, the onslaught begins in the early-morning darkness, when invading columns of buses, taxis, and sputtering auto rickshaws converge on a dirt parking lot across from Angkor Wat's broad moat. They disgorge hundreds of camera-wielding tourists, who march through the gray light toward the gates of the world's largest religious monument.

Hindus constructed it in the 12th century, with a gilded central tower representing Mount Meru, mythical home of the gods and the center of the spiritual and physical universes. They built it facing west, perhaps in honor of the Hindu god Vishnu, preserver of all things.

For today's tourists, the alignment has a more mundane appeal. It's a great place to snap a picture of the sunrise behind sprawling Angkor's best-known temple.

When the shutters stop clicking, tour guides herd their groups into the monument all at once. Tourists jostling for space bump, scrape, and rub their fingers against exquisitely carved stone, adding to centuries of damage to the friezes of soldiers depicted in epic battle atop chariots and elephants.

By dusk, the mob of sightseers has moved to Phnom Bakheng, where buses drop off hundreds of people who then scramble for position on large, delicately balanced stone platforms at the small temple, Angkor's oldest. Obscured from the road by dense forest, it was safely off the regular tour routes until sappers cleared land mines that Khmer Rouge guerrillas had placed to defend the strategic hilltop.

"Now it's suddenly become the destination where everybody wants to be at the end of the day to see the sunset and to see the views, which are spectacular," said Bonnie Burnham, president of the New York-based World Monuments Fund. The nonprofit group helps conserve historic sites around the world.

Many of Phnom Bakheng's 108 shrines stand on platforms that have shifted over the centuries as water trickles in and loosens sand and dirt and the tourists gather.

"The platforms where people stand are not really stable," Burnham said.

"People shouldn't really be touching it or going anywhere near it," she said.

A decade ago, about 300,000 tourists visited Angkor Wat each year. But peace, after decades of civil war and upheaval, opened the tourism floodgates. More than a million people are expected to visit Angkor Wat this year, and the government hopes to draw 3 million to the site by 2010.