The day we almost got arrested.

or better.. heavily fined.

5am in the morning we are in the back of a speedy tuktuk so excited to finally visit the stunning archeological park of Angkor! After few days spent editing it’s exactly what we need.. some adventure and exploration seeing for the first time what it’s well known to be one of the must stunning religious monuments in the world.. Angkor Wat indeed.

Headlamps on our heads and we feel like 2 Indiana Jones walking in the dark.
We reach the temple and watch a beautiful pink sunrise in the back of the temple itself.

I cannot express how happy and excited we are. The surroundings look insane and we are not even entered yet! We can already tell we’ll love every second of this visit today.. but maybe fate has different plans for us.

There are so many people filming and vlogging here, this place is so longed for in the content creation community (let’s say 😅) and we are definitely among the ones with the less fancy equipment.. microphone apart we film everything with our phones!

We start the visit at 6:20am and I kid you not 6 minutes after that we are stopped by a security guard telling us we are not allowed to film. The argument starts right away cause he’s telling us we cannot speak about the temples in our videos cause that’s something guides only can do. We have to ask for a permit to do so, otherwise we will be fined 500$. I’m pretty proud of us cause immediately we answer back. I read everything written on their website (and on the ticket) and we tell him there’s nothing mentioning this. He keeps asking us to do not speak about the history about the temples in our videos and I try to explain to him that we could just take videos and then make a voiceover, which would be the same thing as talking to the camera. He seems to do not understand.

The fight keeps going on for minutes and practically we say that we are gonna continue what we are doing cause it’s our passion and there’s nothing written on our 37$ ticket and not even signs, plus we don’t have the money to hire a guide and then be justified to talk to the camera..

We proceed in our visit with our hearts racing.

Few minutes later another security guard approaches us (evidently sent by the previous one) with even another security guard trying to film us.. At this point we are surrounded by other tourists and we kind of loose it. Firstly I tell them they are not allowed to film us, because we did not grant them our permission. Secondly since there are no signs and nothing online we won’t stop filming and talking to our phones about what we are seeing.

People around us start to notice the quarrel and start looking at us.. and as the security guard starts intimidating us that he could call the police for the fact that we are filming speaking about the history of the temples, I turn around and look at all the other tourists there saying: “this is a scam, you’re all witness! They are telling us we cannot film us speaking after having paid 37$ for a ticket where there’s not mentioned this rule.. can you believe it? And many other people are filming and vlogging here! And this security guards are coming only after us!”

That’s when I think they understood we were not gonna let this down! We are Italians after all 🤣
Which also made me think, if we were filming in Italian nobody would have said anything.

For the second time we walked away from them as they kept telling us not to film us talking about the history of the temples.

Their only issue was that we did not have a guide. They wanted us to hire a guide. But if you don’t write your “rules” on your website, we are not gonna listen to your “rules” cause to me, this whole situation was just stupid. And honestly made no sense. We could have been speaking shit about Angkor Wat and they would not have cared. We “just” could not say when the temple was built. Tell me this is serious.

Obviously this ruined our mood for a while, but if you know us, you’ll know there’s a vlog coming and trust me there won’t be voiceovers speaking about the temples 😉

Today’s lesson for Cambodians, you don’t fuck with Italians.

Peace ✌️