Angkor

On the scales of millennia, the most ponderous, man-hewn stone is powerless and will inevitably turn to dust. So I might as well see them while they (and I) exist, since I am so close, never mind if I am enriching greedy traders who don’t deserve it, making the sites accessible to people that are not even prepared to try to understand them: we will all be there at the same time, enjoying the same thing, in our own different ways. And in my years as a tour guide, I did understand that in spite of the institutional incapability of most visitors to “get it”, wherever they go (me included, I am certainly not “getting it” now), most visitors learn infinitely more about a place by being there as opposed to staying home. Their effort must be appreciated, the same way I consider an artist’s efffort before considering what to think of the work on display in an art gallery. It is a pity though, that the greedy bastards that run Angkor are further ruining the place by building indiscriminately, simply because they don’t understand that the old model (bring them in, keep them dependent and uncapable to take a step on their own, squeeze them in every possible way, repeat) is doomed, and more and more people, if they travel to such hard places, are going to do it to learn and to be in charge of their own destiny, not to be treated like idiots, same way in every port. I was surprised by the number of people visiting Angkor on bicycles and by the amount of families I found on the budget trail, all along my trip, with teenage children (or much younger) and elderly people: these are people who can pay their way to an air-conditioned room, they just don’t see the point of going this far to live exactly the same way people around them lives in their home country, which they find objectionable to begin with. The dinosaurs of mass tourism are decades behind in public attitudes and until they find accomplices in selling this obsolete, wasteful and unnecessary lifestyle, and until some money will keep flowing in, nothing will motivate them to change their ways.