Siem Reap Will Need More Rooms, Officials Say
chrey village, Siem Reap province – The slim pole, stuck in the middle of a rice paddy, doesn’t look like much. But to farmer Ven Von, it represents the end of life as he knows it.
The pole marks the path of a road to be built east of Siem Reap town. The road is slated to plow through Ven Von’s ancestral home, a wooden stilt house shaded by banana and mango trees.
The road is expected to carry tourists from Route 6 to an envisioned lavish complex of hotels, restaurants, shops, museums and sports facilities southeast of the Angkor temple complex.
So far, the long-delayed Siem Reap hotel zone exists only on paper. But already hundreds of families have been shifted to make way for the planned 1,007-hectare development, and scores more are waiting for the ax to fall.
“If I have to sell here, where will I live?’’ Ven Von asked. “If we go to a new place, we will be separated from the old people in the village, the people we have known all our lives.’’
The 60-year-old father of three said he regrets that “I got this land from my ancestors, but I will not be able to leave it to my grandchildren.”
In phase one of the project, 262 families have been moved from a 24-hectare site at the western edge of the hotel zone. Ven Von’s home is within phase two, a 500-hectare area southeast of the first site.
Bun Narith is the man with the difficult job of telling people they must go. He is the deputy director-general of the Apsara Authority, which since January has spent $1 million to clear the zone.
“It is very hard to do this,’’ he said, especially when families have lived on their land for generations. But, he said, it has to be done, because there is little land left along Route 6 to be developed.
According to a royal zoning sub-decree adopted in 1995, the hotel zone was created “in the largely unoccupied and non-arable land” northeast of Siem Reap, to add needed rooms with as little disruption as possible to “the town’s traditional and spatial organization.”
Not much happened with the hotel zone until recently. Sporadic fighting disrupted the Siem Reap area as late as 1998, while the Apsara Authority had no budget to speak of until 1999.
In the interim, however, a number of hotels and guest houses were built outside the zone, mostly along Route 6 near the airport west of town, extending east toward Roluos and north along the main road to Angkor Wat.
Tourism has risen steadily since the fighting stopped. So far this year, arrivals are up by a third; officials expect that to continue through year’s end, topping last year’s total of 264,708 for a new record of about 350,000 visitors.
Within five years, the number could grow to 1 million, Bun Narith said. Ultimately, planners say, as many as 1.5 million tourists a year could descend on Siem Reap.
Thong Khon, secretary of state for the Ministry of Tourism, said there are now about 2,000 rooms in hotels and guest houses. By 2003 Siem Reap is expected to need 3,000 rooms, he said.
Phase one of the zone, to be completed within three years, will include “seven or eight” high-end hotel and add more than 2,000 rooms, said Suy San, second deputy governor of Siem Reap.
The demand will be there, Thong Khon said. “We will definitely need the new hotel zone in the future, because otherwise there will be no place for the visitors to stay.’’
