These days any number of people will delight in ruefully declaring how such and such a place has been ruined — overrun by tourists and commercialism — and, as if to rub salt into the wound, they'll tell you that if you'd only visited it when they first did, you too could have savored Paradise.
These killjoys may be right in some instances, but they're dead wrong when it comes to Angkor, the stunning and magical "city" of over 200 temples built between the ninth and 13th centuries around what is now the modern Cambodian town of Siem Reap.
I first visited in 1996, and then again in 2000, and indeed the inroads of mass tourism were already evident, but muted. In 1996 there were about 55,000 arrivals, and in 2000 some 194,000. It was a tranquil place still emerging from the ravages of civil war.