The Thai-Cambodia Temple Conflict Explained

Following my trip up north for a week, I got about a day’s break before my parents arrived, both fortunate enough to have shifted 12 time zones for a week’s worth of travel. Using the convention of requiring a day of recovery for each time zone crossed, that would put them somewhere in either Eastern Europe or the Western Pacific (however it works) as they boarded the plane back to the States this past Friday. They were troopers though. Each day they’d outlast me, but that was only because their bodies were incapable of sleeping past 6 AM.

Thailand was the bookend for their visit, with Bangkok and a cooking class at the beginning and Koh Samet and a dinner cruise at the end. All the end between time was spent taking in the . . . sights of Cambodia. Yeah, sights, that’s a good way of describing them.

A quick note to preface the following paragraphs: most of this won’t be politically correct. In fact, all of it won’t be. Furthermore, who am I to judge a country on the few citizens I’ve met or the small number of places I’ve visited? But then again, to judge it on anything else wouldn’t make sense, would it?

For the past few months, Thailand and Cambodia have been exchanging words and shots (and gamblers) over a small plot of land within a temple complex called Preah Vihear. What’s so special about one temple when each country has hundreds of others? As far as I can tell, the only thing forcing this issue is Cambodia, a country that functions almost solely on revenues from temple tourism. Thailand on the other hand is simply playing the role of the more accomplished, diversified friend that isn’t going to give something up simply for the principle of it.

Tourists pay $20 for a visa upon arrival and then another $20 to enter the Angkor temple complex. Notice I use the denomination of American dollars. That’s right, the Cambodian riel, trading 4000 to the dollar, isn’t even the preferred denomination in the country. Yet somehow that gives Cambodian visa officials the right to refuse my bill with Andrew Jackson gracing the front all because of a centimeter long tear in it. On what basis do Cambodians have to refuse that bill when it is still perfectly valid in the country that minted it?

But back to tourism. A solid 4 million tourists visit Angkor Wat alone each year, putting the income from tourism (visas and all) at $160 million. Not bad huh? So where does this money go? Not to the development of infrastructure as the capital, Phnom Penh, had very few regions in which a paved road intersected a paved road and the bus ride from Phnom Penh to Siemreap felt more like a ride on the ocean. Education then right? Nope, the kids I met were either selling bootleg books and DVDs, spouting facts about the US, or mowing the grass by hand at Angkor Wat with a scythe. Public works programs? Not quite. The

Cambodian government, albeit faced with a tall task, appears to do little about the status quo.

To be fair though, Cambodia has been ravaged by tourism, perhaps worst of all by

some of its own Asian neighbors. Japanese and Korean companies have the tourism industry so vertically integrated that Andrew Carnegie would be patting them on the back. Japanese tourists will fly over in large groups on Japanese owned airlines and are picked up upon arrival and shuttle around by Japanese owned bus companies. They stay in hotels that are undoubtedly financed by Japanese investors, typically eating at those restaurants housed in the hotel. They then proceed to visit the Angkor temple complex that unsurprisingly has been funded in part by the Japanese government. So what net economic benefit do these companies and tourists bring to the country? Well, I guess they do buy a substantial amount of bottled water. . .

So there you have it, Cambodia’s struggle for temples that ultimately fill the pockets of foreign companies, with American dollars at that. With more companies being developed, more local guides and drivers are put out of business forcing them to become more desperate and more pushy with the tourists that are traveling separate from large groups. This creates bitter memories for the tourists who then recommend to the friends to avoid the place or go with a tour group, thus continuing the cycle.

So there you have it, a naïve Midwesterner’s take on a country he spent less than four days in. Is that the whole picture? Probably not, but it’s the only one that could have been taken. But to leave it at this would be unfair to Cambodia and the millions of tourists that will entered the country whose only hope is to be disappointed (yes, I’m under the impression that millions of people read this blog). There are 3 bright spots to look forward to during a visit to Cambodia: (1) Angkor beer, the national beer of Cambodia, (2) baguettes for breakfast, a remnant of France’s colonization of the country, (3) incredibly soft shirts at dirt cheap prices, just beware of searching for a purple Tiger beer shirt size M.

In my search for pictures, I came across this blog that was great except for the fact that it reminded me how many amazing shots of tour groups I missed.