The Angkor Wat temple and surrounding ruins in the Angkor national park contain hundreds of years of history. When visiting the temples you come to expect that you will see the moss covered stones, broken statues, fallen debris and dirt tracks covered in footprints. It doesn’t occur to you that the temples would be filled with wooden frames, steel reinforcement or tarpaulin to ruin not only your photos but your natural experience.

When visiting the temples a year ago I got the feeling of what it might be like in its heyday. Even though it was difficult to get a clear photo past the throngs of tourists you were still able to walk the dirt tracks reminiscent of a time when workers may have done the same. You could walk through the structures and take yourself back in time to when the stone was untarnished, when the city gleamed with royalty and wonder could capture your spirit.

This feeling is now dying. Now you look upon once beheaded statues with new white cement mould heads trying to depict what it might have looked like. You walk through the temples with the same white cement filling in pillars, tiles and stones everywhere you go. It is an insult, not only to the ancient ruins natural beauty, but also to the tourists themselves. Of the plethora of tourist books available it is easy to imagine what Angkor would have looked like without this ugly detraction.

The profound escalation in reinforced wooden walls, board walks, stairs, guide ropes and white cement begged me to wonder what could have happened in the last year to cause such a dramatic change to the structure of the national park.

In 2008, UK’s The Independent newspaper reported that the growth of Siem Reap was having profound affects on Angkor Wat and other temples. In their interview with Philippe Delanghe, the culture programme specialist at UNESCO’s Phnom Penh office, he was quoted saying:

There is a very important balance between the sand and water on which the temple is built and if that balance is taken away then we might have trouble with collapse. The growth in the number of hotels around Angkor Wat has meant that more and more holes are being drilled into the earth to extract water from the water table and this has profound consequences.

This seems even more evident now. Siem Reap has exploded. In a recent interview with Mr Bunhok Lim, the UNESCO Standing Secretariat of the International Coordination Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor (ICC-Angkor), he agreed that hotel over-population could be causing the profound increase in reconstruction efforts.

In the Sixteenth Plenary Session of the ICC-Angkor held in December 2009, Mr. Yoshihiko Sato, the team leader for the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) stated in reference to The Siem Reap Water Supply Expansion Project¹:

The population is one of the most important factors in determining the scope of the water supply project. The population growth rate of Siem Reap Province shows only 2.5%, while the urban area of Siem Reap City shows a very high rate of 5.2%.

The latest statistics of tourist arrivals in Siem Reap are very high, recording over two million in 2008. As a result, Siem Reap City has limited access to safe drinking water, a sharp increase in demand for water, eventually leading to an increase of the gap between supply and demand. Many organisations/ groups worry about the uncertainty of ground settlement, caused by excessive groundwater exploitation.

This project, well under way now, aims to contribute 90% residential and 100% tourist water coverage by the targeted year 2030. Twenty years is a long time, in the meantime APSARA (Authority for the Protection of the Site and Management of the Siem Reap- Angkor Region) and the ICC-Angkor are working on over 30 projects with international organisations the world over to help maintain the nation’s most prized tourist site.

The Angkor Archaeological Park is one of South East Asia’s most important historical sites. Once on the World Heritage in Danger list, it has been under reconstruction since 1995 when APSARA was formed by royal decree to manage its rebuilding and the influx of tourists. From the sixteenth plenary information I gather that the number of projects are now demonstrating their restoration success, although when I tried to contact anyone other than Mr. Lim regarding what achievement have been made and to question the use of the white cement I have received an empty inbox and no comments from calls.

This long silence immediately has me wondering what they’re hiding. It is undeniable that great achievements have been made to restore Angkor and its surrounding temples but have they gone too far? Are they driven instead by their own personal quests for more money, greater professional acclaim and forgotten that history is meant to be just that, history?

This image sums up my concern. These steps were built to cover over where the tree root had been cut away completely. Why bother? Why not continue the destruction you’d already started and get rid of the entire root?

In line Reference:

1. Sixteenth Plenary Session, Pg18-19. Dec. 2009. International Coordinating Committee for the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor, Published by UNESCO (ICC-Angkor), Phnom Penh, Cambodia.