Tourism Authorities Work to Protect Forgotten Temple From Looters
The line of holes drilled around the image of a reclining Vishnu could only mean one thing. Somebody was planning to inject the holes with acid and rip the image from the rock.
Before the tourists could find it, looters had found the ancient site called Kbal Spean, nearly forgotten in the foothills northeast of Siem Reap.
“We had not planned to open it so soon, but we had to protect against the looting,’’ said Dr Ang Choulean, director of the department of culture and monuments at the Apsara Authority.
So Apsara, the government agency charged with protecting Cambodia’s cultural heritage, last month added another historic site to those it already oversees in the Siem Reap region.
Kbal Spean is named for the natural sandstone bridge that crosses a small river that eventually joins the Siem Reap River.
The site, about 30 km northeast of Angkor Thom, is also called the “River of A Thousand Lingas.” It is similar to the more popular Phnom Kulen, considered the most sacred mountain in Cambodia.
Both feature shallow, rocky riverbeds with many carvings of Indian deities and lingas, the phallic symbol sacred to the Hindu god Shiva. Both date to the 8th century. Both are outside the usual tourist circuit of Angkorean temples.
The difference is that for years, mostly Cambodian visitors have jounced over wretched roads to visit Phnom Kulen, revered as the site where Jayavarman II declared Cambodia independent of Java in AD 802.
“But unlike Kulen, Kbal Spean has been almost unknown,’’ Ang Choulean said. “Few tourists went there.’’
The once heavily forested site was rediscovered by scholars in 1968, he said, only to be further isolated by years of civil war. Those who have visited Kbal Spean say the isolation only adds to its charm. After a 45-minute hike through jungle, visitors emerge to find hundreds of intricate carvings lining the shady riverbed and a cooling waterfall.
“A magical place,’’ one tourist guide said.
So far this year, visitors to Cambodia are up 26 percent over the same period last year, while the daily number of visitors to Angkorean temples has doubled, from 400 to 800, according to Apsara officials.
But as more and more people come to visit Cambodia’s only World Heritage site, pressure on the outlying temples can only increase, Ang Choulean explained.
And looters aren’t the only problem facing Kbal Spean. Both Banteay Srey and Kbal Spean lie to the northeast of the main Angkorean complexes—Banteay Srey about 16 km out and Kbal Spean 9 km further.
The road to both is rutted and bumpy in dry weather, and becomes a muddy mess when it rains. Ang Choulean said it is scheduled to be upgraded at the end of this rainy season.
With fewer Apsara personnel on hand, Kbal Spean and the tiny, beautiful Banteay Srey temple are more vulnerable to aggressive vendors and beggars than the Angkor Wat or Angkor Thom areas.
Some local entrepreneurs at Banteay Srey, for example, tell visitors that they really should go on to see Kbal Spean but they must hire a guide for “security.’’
Nonsense, said Ang Choulean. The tourist area at Kbal Spean has been checked for mines twice, by teams from the Cambodian Mine Action Center. “The site of Kbal Spean is completely safe from mines,’’ he said.
And visitors who buy passes to visit the Angkorean temples do not need to pay additional fees to visit Kbal Spean, he emphasized.
For years local entrepreneurs—often soldiers and police—have charged visitors to Phnom Kulen as much as $20 to view the river carvings, but that is a strictly freelance effort, unrelated to Apsara, Ang Choulean said.
As Kbal Spean became busier, a similar situation was evolving, but Ang Choulean said Apsara neutralized that by hiring the offenders as legitimate guards to protect against looters.
“Now, at least on the site, nobody will ask for money,’’ he explained. “And we have forbidden them to carry guns, because we know the region is safe.’’
He said Apsara has also installed large, illustrated signs in several languages at Kbal Spean, explaining the site’s layout, history and significance.
Most of the carvings date from the 11th through 13th centuries, although inscriptions as old as the 9th century have been discovered.
“The river banks, along with basins carved deep into the river bed, are likewise sculpted with a variety of scenes, symbols and inscriptions,’’ the sign says.
“The most recurrent theme depicted is the recreation of the world fallen into chaos. The god Vishnu reclines on the ocean in meditation, absorbing the watery chaos below; from his navel there grows a lotus flower bearing the recreator god, Brahma.’’
It was just such an image that the looters were trying to steal. But Ang Choulean knows that fending off looters is just one of the problems cash-strapped Apsara must solve to protect Cambodia’s archeological legacy.
“We need to reach a balance between the number of people visiting Angkor and the environment,’’ he said. “That is the challenge. Step by step, we will do it.’’
