Up until late June, thousands of tourists each month would flock to the 11th century Preah Vihear Temple to admire its elegant carvings and crumbling stone staircases.
But now, the stunning UN World Heritage site perched just over the Thai border high on a Cambodian mountaintop is teeming with troops, not tourists, after a decades-long dispute over surrounding land erupted into violence.
The Thai entrance to the temple has been closed since June 22 when border tensions between Thailand and Cambodia unraveled, leaving many Thais along the border who relied on the steady stream of sightseers in dire straits.
“My income has dropped more than 50 percent from when I was selling at the temple,” said 50-year-old clothes vender Malai Konghom, who has had to move her business 13km away from the border. “I am lucky that all my kids have already graduated but I still feel the effects ... I sit here on a quiet day, hoping to sell something to tourists visiting the waterfalls.”
Hotel manager Porntip Nimlamai, 47, said she had to sack a maid and reduce her expenses, as only four of the 14 rooms at her property in Kantharalak town near the border are filled.
“It is quite serious, I stopped doing my accounts in August because it is always in the red,” she said, adding that she had resorted to switching off lights and removing refrigerators from empty guestrooms to reduce bills.
Preah Vihear is the most important example of ancient Khmer architecture outside Cambodia’s famed Angkor Wat temple complex.
Although the World Court ruled in 1962 that it belonged to Cambodia, the most accessible entrance is in Thailand’s northeastern Si Sa Ket Province.
Any tourists wanting to visit from Cambodia would have to scramble up a thickly forested mountain or charter a helicopter.
The current tensions erupted when the UN’s cultural body awarded Preah Vihear World Heritage status, reigniting old arguments about land surrounding the temple, which has never been fully demarcated.
Thailand and Cambodia agreed in August to reduce troop numbers at the site, but the remaining soldiers engaged in a gunfight last week that left two Cambodian soldiers dead and several from both sides injured.
Since the shoot-out, both sides have agreed to a joint border patrol aimed at preventing more violence, but with no timetable planned the villagers have no idea when the border will reopen and healthy trade will return.
Like other countries, Thailand is also suffering from the global financial crisis, and tourists are also wary of domestic political tensions, which erupted into deadly clashes between police and anti-government protesters on Oct. 7 in Bangkok.
Sriphuwong Chantachompoo, a Si Sa Ket tourism official, said that until the military face-off at the border, the number of tourists visiting Preah Vihear from Thailand had been increasing.
Figures from the Thai national park where tourists cross over to Preah Vihear show that during the 2006 to 2007 fiscal year, 142,679 tourists visited the park, up from 125,353 a year earlier.
From Oct. 1, last year until the temple entrance closed in June, it had received 111,728 tourists — and none since.
Sriphuwong said the whole province only sees about 80 tourists a month now, who come to visit the area’s other temples and waterfalls.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
RSS