ON THE ROAD: Until a year ago, the men of Siem Reap rode around town on their motorbikes with guns strapped to their backs. The authorities made them leave their guns at home in recent months because they were frightening the horses.
The horses were thousands of twitchy tourists, many on package tours from Japan and the US, arriving daily to see Cambodia's fabulous World Heritage site, the temples of Angkor.
Siem Reap has the feel of a frontier town: the sun lies in solid blocks on the dusty roads, most of which were only half-heartedly paved in the last few months. Everything is low-level and there are so few street lights, at night the stars literally blaze in an utterly black sky.
Cambodia is bone-deep poor, with an average monthly wage of US$30 (the de facto currency everywhere here is the dollar). Unsurprisingly, bandits abound. It's also haunted by an estimated 6 million unexploded landmines. Siem Reap is hugely prosperous compared to the rest of Cambodia, yet even here evidence of poverty is everywhere.
On every journey I made out to the temples, I saw people gathering firewood from the jungle; the town's filthy river serves as laundry, bathroom and kitchen; landmine victims beg outside every hotel or restaurant used by Westerners; and giving a tip of any amount can make you want to expire with embarrassment, so amazed and grateful is the response.
Returning to my hotel the first night, I was startled to see one of the elderly hotel employees asleep on the table at which I had eaten breakfast from that morning; reclining on her back, solemn as an effigy. She's been there every night since. I could also be cynical and note that Siem Reap's army of ex-pats working for NGOs ticks the box marked "In Need of Aid" - whether wanted or not.
On the first day of visiting the temples ($40 for a three-day pass), my motorbike driver pointed out the Grand Hotel d'Angkor en route, telling me that some rooms there cost $1,900 a night. My own spotless and beautiful hotel room in a charming old French-colonial building cost me $6 a night, so what one gets when paying 300 times more is bewildering to contemplate even for me, but for him it was simply beyond all belief.
The Grand at least has been around a long time, but built in the last 18 months are eight hotels catering almost exclusively for package tours. Siem Reap's airport now has a free-skies policy and airlines are queuing up for landing time: visas available to all on arrival, for $20.
Right now in Siem Reap, two things are very clear. The town is on the cusp of becoming a major international tourist destination, and a specific group of people are getting obscenely rich.
The Cambodian Daily reported visitor figures to Siem Reap from January-November 2002 as 277,000; a straight increase of one-third on the previous year.
The reason for all this activity are the extraordinary temples of Angkor, built between the ninth and 13th centuries by Khmer kings to glorify both themselves and their surroundings, and which cover an area of some 40 square kilometres. They were rediscovered in the late 19th century by French archaeologists, who reclaimed them from the jungle during decades of work and made their name world-famous.
You could ransack the dictionary and not find enough superlatives to describe these impossibly romantic temples, each one unique and literally breath-taking. Some, like Angkor Wat itself, resemble palaces, with their incredible walls of bas-relief.
Bayon is a kind of Indochina Easter Island, with its scores of huge carved faces, some with eyes closed and some disconcertingly open. And a few, like Ta Prohm and Preah Khan, have been left as they were before the archaeologists found them: fantastical jigsaws of carved corridors and doorways, opening to startling vistas of huge, centuries-old fig and silk-cotton trees growing over and through the stone; astonishing fusion of man and nature; the scenes of imagination, except it's sublimely real.
The real joy of exploring Angkor is that you can still do it alone, without a guide: still scramble where you will and sit for as long as you like, trying to absorb something of the extraordinary atmosphere, with the rustling jungle thick and green beyond.
The ticket-sales, management and responsibility for the temples are shared by a bewildering number of domestic and international bodies. There are many unanswered questions as to how the ruins will survive the expected influx of visitors in the coming years, but the present unrestricted access policy will surely go, due to worries about erosion.
Meanwhile, the jungle at least is kept from destroying any more of the structures, but the jungle creatures still roam where they will. Leaving Preah Khan, a venomous green snake fell out of a tree overhead and into my path, exactly one pace ahead.
One pace faster, and it would have landed right on me. As nasty moments go, it rated the full five stars, but at least it provided the Japanese tour group behind me with a special photo-moment, as they pointed their digital cameras both at the snake and my rapidly retreating self.
