Angkor Wat
One of the sites throttling their visitors is Angkor Wat in Cambodia. This temple complex near Siem Reap, Cambodia, started its life as a 12th century Hindu temple, built to resemble the peaks of Mount Meru. In the 17th century, it converted to a Buddhist temple, was never fully abandoned, but its use decreased and the buildings became neglected, left to let nature take over. In 1843, French explorer Henry Mouhot found the site and introduced it to western audiences, saying it is “grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome.” During the French occupation of Cambodia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the site opened for tourists. It closed again during the Cambodian Civil War and rise of the Khmer Rouge, which aside from some bullet damage to the site, left very little major damage to the structural or historic integrity of Angkor Wat.
