I had to show my pass for admission to every temple site, but who were the armed guards I showed it to? Cambodian Army, Khmer Rouge? Bellhops from the Sokha Hotel? And why did they let us clamber up the ancient walls and run our palms over the fragile bas reliefs? Concession stands had been erected outside each ruin, but they mostly served packaged Ramen noodles -- from Indonesia, ironically -- cooked in tepid water that I hoped only looked like it came from the drainage ditches. The moment I reached the next site and dismounted from the back of my moto, hordes of prepubescent girls charged at me with Cokes, postcards, and crude twanging thumb harps; as if they were desperate to sell everything now, now, now, because maybe tomorrow no one would come. Tomorrow the Khmer Rouge would rise again and drive the tourists out of Cambodia; a monsoon would flood the town or the Siamese would sack it; or we Westerners would discover a new holy playground somewhere else. (Don't look now but it's Pagan in Burma.) Half the locals were in a frenzy, half seemed bemused, and all of them lacked the poise that should have come from living easily off of Cambodia's top revenue source, which Angkor is.

In jarring contrast to ancient Angkor, much of Siem Reap has obviously been tossed up in the last five years. Not surprisingly, the glittering resorts are tarnished by flagrant delinquency at the foundations of infrastructure. Most roads are still unpaved, even downtown, and turn to impassable mire with every rain shower. The vendor who sold me the cold noodles had parked his cart on a main drag that was almost totally unlit. As in most frontier towns, a constant menace lurks. Insofar as it is scarred by tourism and by its genocidal legacy, and hard by the vestiges of a great lost civilization, Siem Reap resembles some of the ragged towns around the Indian reservations in the US. Gallup, New Mexico comes to mind: the ruins are Anasazi rather than Khmer; the threat is of grand theft auto instead of land mines; it has a necklace of scruffy motels and pawn shops instead of thickets of rickety guesthouses and souvenir stands; and the poor are drunken Indians rather than begging amputees. But there is that same sleepy borderland lawlessness. Many locals seem lost and dazed, yet half-cocked -- after a generation of guerilla terror, it's no wonder -- and baffled by our tourism. In many ways Siem Reap hasn't evolved since the French occupation, when locals did laundry and cooked and chauffeured for the imperialist résidents. After all, that's what they did for me.

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