GETTING IT WRONG - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 62

warriors on elephants, all capturing the history and people of the Angkor Empire—“the
greatest in ancient Southeast Asia.”
The zenith of their life as tour guides was the day in 1967 that Jacqueline Kennedy
came to Angkor, “fulfilling a childhood dream.” The guides followed her around as she
climbed the worn stone temple stairs, and saffron-robed monks stole glimpses of her from
the shadows. That day the world was reminded of the former glory of Cambodia, a point
of pride later on during the war as they saw the country falling apart day by day.
“Becker, you have to see the sun set over Angkor.”
The romance of tourism was imprinted on my twenty-five-year-old soul as we moved
from one grisly scene to another, often driving in those same white Mercedes that had
been used for tourism at Angkor.
Cambodians had to wait twenty more devastating years for peace to come, twenty years
of unimaginable hell. The war ended in 1975 but the victorious Khmer Rouge imme-
diately launched a revolution that killed off one-fourth of the people and purposely des-
troyed most of Cambodia's sophisticated, cultured society. That fatal madness was fol-
lowed by another decade of decay and neglect as Cambodia was fought over as a dubious
prize in the last decade of the Cold War.
The United Nations finally sent a peacekeeping mission to Cambodia in 1993, putting
an end to foreign intervention and years of war. They supervised a democratic election,
but the losers threatened a civil war if they weren't included in the government. The U.N.
gave in to their demands and anointed a joint government that included some brilliant of-
ficials, some incompetent officials, many corrupt officials, all working in an atmosphere of
mistrust. These were the people charged with reviving a poor, exhausted country with few
resources.
They did agree on one matter—tourism would be essential to their recovery. There
wasn't much left standing after war, revolution, genocide, famine and degradation: man-
ufacturing had been depleted by 1975; farming was largely at a subsistence level thanks
to too many radical experiments; and many of the surviving professionals and educated
classes had fled Cambodia for life overseas. Tourism, centered on Angkor, that would at-
tract wealthy middle and adventurous classes, was the only industry that could bring in
desperately needed foreign exchange.
This was a somewhat radical idea for a poor country in the early 1990s. If it hadn't been
for Angkor and its cultural cachet, Cambodia wouldn't have had a chance at that end of
the market. But it made sense at the time, with tourists looking for “exotic” destinations
and with modern air transportation hubs in nearby Bangkok and Singapore.
Among poorer countries, Cambodia became a pioneer in using tourism as a develop-
ment strategy at the end of war. In theory, the country had everything: the exquisite ruins
at Angkor, comparable in their majesty and cultural importance to those in Greece and
Egypt; unspoiled beaches and islands on the southern coast along the Gulf of Thailand;