Cambodia: No revealing clothes at Angkor temples

By Julia Wallace

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AA) – Cambodia has urged tour operators to stop tourists from wearing inappropriate or revealing clothing when visiting its renowned UNESCO heritage site Angkor Wat and surrounding temples, a government official said Thursday.

A spokesman for a government body that oversees the temples told Anadolu Agency that the Apsara Authority had issued a code of conduct for tourists in December stipulating that they must dress modestly and conduct themselves appropriately at the religious site, but that it was still not being consistently adhered to.

“There are still some tourists who are still wearing these revealing clothes, so that is why we are making this announcement again to inform tourists, and those who are concerned with the tourism industry, to tell this information to tourists before they come to the site,” Long Kosal said.

The code of conduct asks visitors to refrain from wearing “revealing” shorts and skirts or exposing their bare shoulders.

Kosal said these were guidelines rather than hard-and-fast rules, but that ticket-sellers at Angkor had been instructed to deny entry to anyone deemed to be dressed disrespectfully.

“Some did not even put on their, I’m sorry to say this, but they did not put a bra on, and some are revealing their buttocks. It’s just not acceptable,” he underlined.

In the future, such malefactors would be “advised to change their clothes and then they will be allowed to buy the ticket,” he added.

The Angkor Code of Conduct was formulated in the wake of several incidents in which tourists at the temples stripped off their clothes or exposed their bare buttocks, then posted photographs of their hijinks on the Internet.

Two American sisters were deported after taking pictures of each other’s naked buttocks at a temple near Angkor Wat in February 2015. The previous month, three Frenchmen were also deported after they stripped naked at Angkor Wat.

Cambodia’s government is also trying to get tourists to stop smoking and littering at the temples and to refrain from touching, writing on, or attempting to remove stone reliefs and sculptures.

In 2014, a New Zealand woman shattered a centuries-old statue of the Buddha after illicitly spending the night in one of the temples.

“The site is also a sacred site -- we, the people of Cambodia, and also other Buddhist believers go there to pray, to seek happiness, and therefore if tourists dress inappropriately and reveal parts of their body, that is not acceptable to us,” Kosal said.