Southeast Asia

Early morning traffic, Angkor gate

In 1993, after Angkor was added to Unesco’s World Heritage List, just 7,650 intrepid visitors ventured to the site. Last year Sokimex, the oil company controversially granted the entrance concession on behalf of the government’s Apsara Angkor management, sold almost 900,000 tickets worth $25m (£12.8m), with British travellers making up the fourth biggest contingent behind South Koreans, Japanese and North Americans. Three million visitors are expected in 2010. —Guardian

Three million visitors! Imagine three million visitors tromping through your home. It’s not built for three million visitors to start with, right, there’s no plumbing for that, and the couch can’t take it, plus, everyone’s going to be touching stuff they’re not supposed to be touching, and standing on that one step that you know is rickety but no one else does, and dropping stuff accidentally and leaning on things and just generally exerting massive wear and tear on the place.

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They’re everywhere, all day long. They’ve got plastic baskets of bracelets, strings of origami fish folded out of silk scraps, little handbags, cheap photocopies of guidebooks, postcards, postcards, postcards. You see them at 6 in the morning and at 11 at night. You think they should be in bed, at school, on the playground… at an early morning breakfast in the Angkor Complex, I watched an 11(ish) year old boy go back and forth between taking orders and selling souvenirs while his much smaller brother focused on moving the postcard inventory. “You buy. Ten for one dollar. 1..2..3..4..”

I asked our guide why they weren’t in school. “Later,” he said. “They work in the early morning, then they go to school.” This might have been true of these particular kids, but everywhere we went, all day long, we saw children working the streets.

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