Siem Reap has grown nicely enough to cope. Its Yellow Pages lists 127 hotels, ranging from budget to super-luxury, and almost every big hotel has an in-house casino. Many of these are huge, resort-style establishments with spas, sprawling swimming pools, nightclubs, and a wide variety of restaurants. It's not anymore like before when tourists tired out doing the exacting Angkor circuit had little else to do to relax and unwind. Today, Siem Reap is a destination in itself, complete with bars, massage parlours, Internet cafes, and ethnic shopping. And, as an added attraction, a 125-hectare, 18-hole, and 72-par golf course has opened just 23 km outside of Siem Reap and a second one is in the making.
[WS:] Been there last summer. I did not give the rat's ass about the golf course (an agricultural cooperative would certainly be a much better use of those 125 hectares of land), but otherwise the place a quite an impressive monument of human decline and the nature taking over. Especially Angkor - the artificial "mountains" of Buddhist temples crumbling and being reclaimed by the jungle (see my pics at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/wsokol52/album?.dir=/36d0re2&.src=ph (it should be publicly accessible, if not let me know)
While I am certainly for modernity and civilization, human -built structures, especially monumental ones, being overtaken by nature and vegetation, has a strong appeal to my "degenerate" aesthetic sensibilities.
The "has been" Angkor is surrounded by extreme poverty. While Siem Reap is doing fine due to the booming tourism industry, the surrounding areas (especially the boat people - see the pics) live in unspeakable poverty and access to basic services, especially health care.
It also provides an interesting context to Pol-Pot's regime policies of depopulating cities and returning back to primitive agriculture to build national strength. It is not surprising that someone living in the shadow of the has-been Angkor and the peasant resilience against the odds may come to a conclusion the latter is the answer and the former has to go.
Another observation - despite it spectacular monumentalism, Angkor is quite primitive architecturally. The place was built around the same as the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. While the Notre Dame is a monument of structural engineering (esp. its flying buttresses), Angkor is simply an earth mound covered with stone blocks and does not even use structural arches which are essential for spanning large areas (Angkor arches are emulated by overlapping stone slabs and thus do not support anything above them). Another difference: Notre Dame was built for "the masses" to come in - Angkor was built so nobody but a select few can get in.
In any case, the place is definitely one of the most interesting I have visited.
Wojtek