I first went to Angkor Wat in 2005, and while there were plenty of visitors, it was nothing like our experience there last week. Tourism is booming in Cambodia and has definitely brought some changes. One of them is the inability for people to go climbing about on the temples as they please. In 2005 I snapped this shot of a monk climbing up the central tower in Angkor Wat. There was almost nobody else around and he had stopped to catch his breath, or perhaps just to admire the view and I happened to look up and catch him gazing out at the front of the temple complex. Today, you can’t just make your way up the crumbling stone steps, they have built wooden platform stairs on top of the originals, you have to wait in a long line to go up, and you are restricted to a brief 20 minute visit. It was sort of a bummer to not be able to wander at our leisure, though the new rules do make it safer, and better for the preservation of the temples.
The Parallel Life 
Yes, we joined the queues to climb up the wooden stairs in March this year. It´s a difficult balance, isn´t it?
It is, though preservation is an absolute necessity with the huge number of tourists.
Were you allowed to enter Angkor Wat without having shoulders covered? I went with a scarf wrapped around me and that wasn’t sufficient. It HAD to be at least T-shirt length sleeves. Every other temple either let me wear a tank top or allowed the scarf.
The first time I went I wore a tank top and it wasn’t an issue, nobody was even up there. In fact, at that point, they weren’t even checking anywhere that you had bothered to buy a ticket! This time our tuktuk driver warned us that we wouldn’t get in without a shirt, so I brought a cover-up one that I did have to put on twice.