On TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and wherever else stupid videos proliferate on the internet, a popular trend that has recently emerged involves clips of tourists running and jumping their way through Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple complex near Siem Reap.
They're attempting to re-create in live action the Temple Run video game, which was first released in 2011 and centers on an explorer dashing through stone ruins while pursued by demonic monkeys.
Because Temple Run's animation resembles the 900-year-old Angkor ruins, social media users can create easily recognizable replicas of the game by speeding along the UNESCO World Heritage Site's stone pathways, leaping to collect imaginary coins, and rushing headlong into stone chambers and narrow corridors.
Many of the clips use sounds from the game and some feature overlays of Temple Run graphics.
What wit.
There are at least two big problems with the trend, however.
First, Angkor's more than 100 Hindu-Buddhist temples make up what UNESCO describes as "one of the most important archaeological sites in South-East Asia." Spreading across 400 acres and dating back almost a millennium, the temples of the complex contain priceless carvings and sculptures that could be damaged by TikTokkers crashing around the place just because nobody gave them enough attention when they were children.
“It’s nonsense,” conservationist Hans Leisen, who has worked for decades to preserve Angkor Wat's sculptures, told Bloomberg. “If you’re running through the temple, you will not see the beauty of the carvings. And if you fall or stumble, you’ll touch a wall to stabilize yourself and endanger the fragile carvings.”
@chiaracontino_ Temple Run in real life ???? #cambodia #angkorwatcambodia #angkorwattemple #templerun ? original sound - Apollo_tee2.0
What's more—and this is the second big problem with the Temple Run videos—the trend is profoundly disrespectful to the site's cultural and religious significance.
As another Angkor conservationist, Simon Warrack, put it in the same Bloomberg report, “It’s not just potential damage to the stones by people bumping into them and falling or knocking things over—which is real—but it’s also damage to the spiritual and cultural value of the temples.”
Warrack points out that every stone at the complex "is considered to contain the spirits of the ancestors," underlining that these structures are fundamentally religious. He adds: “You wouldn’t run through St. Peter's in Rome or any Western church, so why is it OK to do it in Cambodia?”
Still, some Cambodian news coverage of the Temple Run trend has been less critical, with local outlets arguing at times that the videos promote tourism by showing off the country's beauty and unique cultural offerings.
Cambodian tourism could certainly use a boost; visitation numbers have been in a slump ever since the pandemic. The reported $24.4 million brought in by entrance tickets at the Angkor temple complex in the first half of 2024, for example, remains less than half the $57.7 million the site earned during the same period in 2019.
But surely the solution to lagging tourism dollars isn't to encourage internet buffoons to put one of the country's leading tourist attractions at risk. Cambodia's temples deserve protection. Let the people of TikTok stick to the important business of raw-dogging flights.
Related: Idiotic Viral Travel Hacks You Shouldn't Bother Trying When You Fly
