Cambodian temple site draws visitors
SAMBOR PREI KUK, Cambodia — It has survived centuries of monsoon rains, a US bombing campaign and rampant looting.
Now the ancient temple city of Sambor Prei Kuk in Cambodia is finally ready for a renaissance — and is luring tourists to its forest-cocooned ruins.
Cloistered by trees and linked by winding dirt trails, the site has played second fiddle to its much bigger cousin to the west — Angkor Wat — Cambodia’s top tourist destination.
But in July it was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, promising a tourist bonanza that could breathe new life into a once-thriving sixth- and seventh-century metropolis.
“We have already seen more local and foreign tourists flocking to visit our site,” says Hang Than, an official who manages the compound, as he strolls toward one of several temples spectacularly wrapped in tree roots.
For now, the tourist infrastructure is basic.
The ancient city in central Kampong Thom province lies down a pot-holed road where a few food hawkers cluster beneath umbrellas in the dusty parking lot.
Several tour guides lounge around a small booth servicing a growing fleet of tour buses that arrive, for now, mainly on weekends.
“We are very happy and we were so surprised that this site has been listed,” says 45-yearold Mao Sambath, who has been making the hourlong motorcycle ride to sell a spread of tropical fruits to backpackers and Chinese tour groups.
“Today, we have even more vendors than yesterday.”
Trees and looters
Sambor Prei Kuk, which means “the temple in the richness of the forest”, boasts nearly 300 brick temples and heaps of ruins across a 25-squarekilometer compound.
The city, some 200 km north of Phnom Penh, was once the seat of the Chenla kingdom that flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries before the height of the Khmer Empire that raised the mega-city of Angkor.
The temples were rediscovered by French scholars in the 1880s when Cambodia was part of France’s Indochina empire.
It took decades to pare back tree roots and lumps of earth that had consumed the monuments over the centuries.
“At first they only found 16 temples, but then they started to clean the sites,” explains Hang Than, who’s an archaeologist by training.
But the excavation halted as Cambodia fell into war, with a hailstorm of US bombs hitting the area during the Vietnam War in the 1970s, leaving behind hundreds of craters.
Restoration efforts were rebooted in the late 1990s.
With help of Japanese partners, conservationists spent decades hacking back trees and stabilizing the structures.
The painstaking work was rewarded with the UNESCO listing, which carries fresh funds to preserve the temples and manage the impact of tourism.
“It was very different when I first started to work in this area,” says Lay Alex, who began leading tours a decade ago.