GETTING IT WRONG - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 61

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GETTING IT WRONG
The Cambodian War introduced me to the seductive power of tourism. It was the early
1970s. Cambodia was the last country drawn into the larger Vietnam War, and it was being
torn apart by massive bombings, indiscriminate shelling and horrifying atrocities. I was a
young reporter learning my trade, thankful for any interruption in this progression of death.
At the end of a nasty day, when a mortar attack had torn into an open-air marketplace and
wounded dozens of women and children, I caught a ride back to the city with Dith Pran, a
Cambodian colleague.
My horror subsided during the drive as Dith Pran and I talked about what we had seen
and what it meant. To lighten the mood he switched to one of his favorite topics: the mo-
numental temples at Angkor in northwest Cambodia.
“Becker,” he said, “you have to see Angkor. I'll show you around, you'll be a tourist.”
Dith Pran would later become famous as the hero in the movie The Killing Fields , but
at that point he was simply a journalist who, like so many other Cambodian journalists,
had worked around the temples of Angkor when his country was at peace. When war broke
out in 1970, these former tour guides, hotel clerks and drivers were hired immediately by
foreign journalists who needed help translating the language and the country. Tour guides
knew their way around Cambodia and knew its history. Sok Nguon, who had been trained
at the EFEO Center, the French archeology school that restored the Angkor temples and
researched their history, was snapped up by Reuters as an interpreter and driver. For them,
the temples at Angkor—one of the most elegant wonders of the world—symbolized their
country at peace, at its best.
The Communists gained control of the temples in the first days of the war, and they were
off-limits to those of us living on the government side. That made them even more beautiful
in memory. On the hottest, most dispiriting days, Cambodian journalists would reminisce
about driving tourists in a white Mercedes sedan to see the temples at dawn. The wartime
markets of Phnom Penh still sold the remaining temple rubbings made of the bas-reliefs
along the galleries and courtyards of the most famous temples of Angkor Wat and Angkor
Thom, scenes of Hindu and Buddhist gods, demons and dancing angels, the battles with