As the rising sun clears away the morning mist, four Khmer workers from the Siem Reap area arrive ...

As the rising sun clears away the morning mist, four Khmer workers from the Siem Reap area arrive at the twelfth century temple complex of Angkor Wat with tools to continue work on clearing a mass of vegetation, weeds and rubbish that clog the wide moat that surrounds the site. Until its abandonment as Cambodia's capital in the fifteenth century, an intricate system of channels and dams kept Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples and monuments supplied with enough water to fill the moats and sustain a large population on the normally dry plain that overlooks the Tonle Sap lake. More recent neglect during the Khmer Rouge regime of the mid 1970s, followed by 10 years of Vietnamese occupation and continuing civil war saw the entire Angkor complex overgrown, many of its carvings sold to finance weapons purchases and damage caused by reckless target practice. With the arrival of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), restoration projects were restarted with much of the work funded internationally by UNESCO and countries including Australia, Japan and India.