I loved visiting the Angkor temples around Siem Reap--the two days I spent hiking there were wonderful and revelatory. But I'll admit that, as amazing as it is to climb all over and get up close with some astonishing works of art, the varying states of conservation at the temples left me fairly anxious. First, for Angkor, tourism is clearly both a blessing and a significant challenge. Admission to the temples is run by a hotel chain, and is magnitudes more expensive than any other entry fee I paid anywhere in Cambodia: $20 for a day, $40 for three days, etc. Some of that funding goes to the hotel chain that runs the admissions process, but it's more money than the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap would be getting charging smaller piecemeal rates. But tourism is also clearly overwhelming to the sites themselves. When I climbed one temple to watch the sun set on my first day, the structure was literally packed. That's not a problem in and of itself, but a thousand-plus people clambering up and around a stone structure every day of the year takes its toll. And it's not merely getting there: my guide, and other guides I saw, actively encouraged visitors to touch certain reliefs, despite the fact that, like the monkey warrior in the slide show, they're becoming shiny from contact with human hands. Oils and contact ultimately lead to deterioration. It's an odd lapse in what otherwise seems like a reasonably rigorous guide training program.
And the reconstruction efforts themselves raised all kinds of questions for me. For example, in Ta Prohm, the overgrown temple made famous by Tomb Raider, and Preah Khan, there are huge piles of stones that were part of the original structures simply heaped in courtyards. They aren't being protected from deterioration by wind and rain, and the fact that they're piled up like rubble can't be great: that weight's got to produce a fair amount of friction. At Banteay Srei, a beautifully preserved sandstone temple far from the core Angkor Wat complex, the stones are at least sorted and set out in order behind chain link, but they're still outside, on the grass and open to the sun and rain.
I even wondered about the wisdom of letting trees grow up in the temples. Obviously at this point, some trees are so intertwined with the temples that to remove them would threaten the structural integrity of the buildings (like the tree that's essentially holding together a small stone building in the picture of Preah Khan), something that's already a threat to the entire area because as new hotels break ground, the Siem Reap water table is dropping, and the ground under the temples is shifting. But it doesn't seem like new trees should be allowed to grow just because Ta Prohm's gotten popular because it's gotten jungly.
Among all these natural problems, there are severe human ones as well. Because smuggling has become such a significant threat to Angkor artifacts, almost none of the statues that appeared in chambers in the temples are in their original locations. Big bas-reliefs, balustrades and pediments are in place because they're exceedingly hard to move. But statues are gone, to museums, academic institutions, or legitimate private collectors unless they're too damaged or disfigured (when the temples changed hands between Hindus and Buddhists in antiquity, adherents of the new faith often chiseled out representations of gods or Buddha--the Khmer Rouge left Angkor alone because it was a representation of what the Cambodian people could accomplish), or they're more contemporary representations that are part of ongoing worship. I found myself inexplicably depressed by seeing a group of statues literally padlocked behind bars in one of the temples. I suppose it's better to have some of the statues in place, but those are grim conditions in which to see them.
These are complicated decisions all, and they're being made by a complicated network of organizations--almost every temple restoration I saw seemed to be under the authority of a collaborating group of organizations, whether APSARA, UNESCO, or various international governments. I don't know how those groups make decisions among themselves, or what body of conservation laws guides them. They have different base material to work with at each site, so of course the results are different. But if tourists are going to continue to flood Angkor, and if the temples are going to be around to awe them, it seems likely that all the teams in all their permutations will have to raise their conservation standards.