Hunsenomics and Its Discontents - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 131

CHAPTER SEVEN
Hunsenomics and Its Discontents
Just before dawn each day, thousands of foreign tourists leave their guesthouses and hotels
in Siem Reap, Cambodia's main tourist hub, and make their way out of town. An exodus
of buses, cars, and sputtering tuk-tuks crawls past hotels and service stations, still glowing
in the faint morning light. A few kilometers outside town the road enters an enveloping
rural darkness, skirting a broad moat dotted with lotus flowers. Visitors alight near an an-
cient limestone causeway bridging the water. After crossing and entering a small stone en-
tranceway, their goal looms suddenly and majestically into view: Angkor Wat, Cambodia's
symbol and talisman, its five sandstone towers backlit by the first fiery streaks of morning.
An image of this wondrous temple-city has graced the flag of every Cambodian regime
since independence. It has also driven a recent surge in tourism to Cambodia. Around 4.2
million people visited the country in 2013, with a trip to Angkor Wat and its surrounding
temples often at the top of their list. 1 The tourism boom has transformed the gateway town
of Siem Reap from a dusty township in one of Cambodia's poorest provinces into a tour-
istic oasis of cocktail bars, restaurants, massage parlors, and blue hotel swimming pools.
To cope with greater visitor numbers, access to the Angkor temples has been speeded up
and streamlined. Tourists are greeted at the entrance gate by smiling staff who photograph
them and print their faces on a personalized ticket: either a US$20 pass, which grants a
single day's access, a $40 pass for three days, or a week-long pass for $60. The process
is so quick and professional that few visitors think to ask where their money goes. Most
probably assume it goes toward preserving temples and monuments for future generations.
The truth, as so often in Cambodia, is more tangled. Each ticket to the Angkor Archae-
ological Park features the name of a company, Sokha Hotels Ltd. Sokha Hotels is a subsidi-
ary of Sokimex Group, a petrol conglomerate owned by Sok Kong, an oknha tycoon close
to Prime Minister Hun Sen. In May 1999 the Cambodian government awarded control of
Angkor ticketing to Sokha Hotels. No competing bids were taken. In a sweetheart deal,
Kong was asked to pay the government a flat fee of $1 million each year and pocketed
everything above that. The deal was renegotiated the following year, again in secret, and