Cambodia - Tourist traps

So we're in Cambodia today (I know, these posts aren't coming out in chronoligical order - sorry!) and Hubby says to me "Imagine that in a thousand years Paris looks exactly like this?"

We arrived in Siem Reap this morning and headed straight to the world famous Angkor ruins. Located in a dense jungle, this awe-inspiring temple complex is so huge and so amazing and so incredible that you better buy a three day pass mininum because any time less spent here simply wont be enough to cover the very basics.

So there we were, walking around the Ta Prohm temple which is perhaps the most mysterious of all the temple structures of Angkor. From what we gather, when the european archeological team that discovered Angkor in the mid 20th century came upon Ta Pohm, they decided to leave this immense temple exactly as they found it - no restoration at all- as testimony of how Angkor looked when it was rediscovered and unburied.

So basically you've got half crooked buildings barely standing in the middle of the jungle, invaded by gigantic trees with larger-than- houses-apparent roots and vegetation claiming possesion of the ruins, huge blocks of delicately hand-carved stone resting in the exact same position where they fell off and laying there for centuries... Really, Ta Pohm is what REAL ruins are all about, not that Disneyland cleaned- up-nicely-for-the-tourists feeling you get at places like say Chichen Itzá or the Alhambra.

But back to my story; Hubby turns to me and says "what if in 1000 years this is Paris?", and you know what? I don't find that idea so far fetched. If there's one thing I've learned from traveling is that no single dynasty has ever succeeded in LASTING.

Jerusalem, Venice, Constantinople, the Edo empire in Japan, Rome,The Catholic Spanish Kings, Napoleon, the Ottoman empire, the greeks, the roman, the persians, the aztecs, the incas, the british, the egyptian, the dinosours.... no powerful capital, no invincible people, no unbeattable king, emperor or governor has ever managed to beat that single most powerful force in the entire universe: changing times.

For hundreds of years, the Khmer Empire stood as the single most powerful empire in all of South Asia. Angkor and its mind boggling temples are living testimony of that power and yet, here they stand, centuries later, ruined and abandoned, subjected to the ridicule of 40$-three-day-passes and never ending tourist buses dumping their cargo at the foot of what was once home to the most magnificent, powerful, mythical civilization in the continent.

Changing times, shifting powers, erosion of forces, unbalanced weights.... if those past dynasties which lasted decades, centuries, sometimes even a millenia, if even them were defeated and overpowered at some point in time, what makes us so confident that the powerful dynasties of today, the ruling countries, the developped civilizations, the invincible political structures of this age and time.... what makes us so absolutely certain that they wont become the tourist attractions of tomorrow?

Fned.
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