Cambodia: one enormous day at Angkor, and one day to recover from it

Angkor Wat in silhouette at sunrise, five towers reflected in the pool with orange breaking through cloud — 05:52. Everybody warns you it will be crowded. Nobody warns you it will be worth it anyway.

Three nights in Siem Reap, and no Phnom Penh at all.

We had four countries behind us by this point and one to go, and rather than try to do Cambodia properly we did one small part of it properly instead. That turned out to be the right call, and it produced the two best days of the whole month — back to back, and complete opposites.

Day one was Angkor: out of the door at half past four in the morning, back at the hotel at three in the afternoon, five temples deep. Day two we did absolutely nothing on purpose.

This is part four of six.

The route

Stop	Nights	Getting there
Siem Reap	3	Flight from Ho Chi Minh City
— Angkor Archaeological Park	day trip	20 minutes by tuk-tuk
Onward to Malaysia	—	Covered in part five

One town, three nights, no internal travel at all. After Vietnam — three flights in eight days — this was an enormous relief, and we would recommend it on those grounds alone. If you are running a multi-country month, put your one stationary stop somewhere near the end.

Siem Reap: smaller and softer than you expect

Siem Reap is a small town wrapped around an enormous ruin, and it manages that with more grace than it has any right to. You can walk most of it. The river runs through the middle. Everything closes earlier than you think.

We landed mid-afternoon and did the only sensible thing, which was to eat.

A Khmer lunch of fish amok in banana leaf, green papaya salad, chicken with fried egg and rice, and a watermelon smoothie — First meal in the country. Fish amok — coconut, lemongrass and galangal steamed in banana leaf until it sets like a custard — is the national dish and deserves to be.

Then, inevitably, Pub Street, which is exactly what it sounds like and is best treated as a twenty-minute walk-through rather than an evening.

A man standing under the neon Pub Street sign in Siem Reap at night, bars and lights either side — Pub Street. Go once, look at it, and then go somewhere else.

The somewhere else is two minutes away and much better: the covered night markets, where the food stalls sit under ceilings hung with hundreds of woven fish traps turned into lampshades.

A covered night market in Siem Reap with dozens of woven basket lampshades hanging from the ceiling above food stalls — The lampshades are old bamboo fish traps. This is where we ate most nights.

Angkor: the big day

Getting up at half past four

The alarm goes at 04:30 and it is the correct decision, though it will not feel like it. Your tuk-tuk driver is waiting in the dark. The road out to the park is full of other tuk-tuks doing exactly the same thing, headlights and dust, everybody silent.

A temple building in near-darkness before dawn, with the last of the moonlight in the sky above — 05:32, and not yet light. You buy your pass in the dark and walk in with a torch.

You cross the moat, walk the causeway, and find your spot at the northern reflecting pool with a few hundred other people. And then you wait, and the sky does the thing.

Angkor Wat's five towers in silhouette against a dawn sky, reflected in the still water of the pool — The five towers come up out of the dark before the sun does.

Here is the honest version: it is crowded, and it does not matter. People will tell you the Angkor sunrise is ruined by the numbers. It is not. The crowd is quiet, the pool is long enough to absorb everyone, and the thing you have come to see is nine hundred years old and roughly the size of a small city. It is not diminished by there being four hundred people in front of it.

A couple holding hands between two stone columns, with the towers of Angkor Wat hazy in the light behind — Just after sunrise, when everyone else has gone to breakfast.

The trick everybody misses

Almost the entire sunrise crowd leaves immediately afterwards, in a single wave, to go and eat. If you stay — with a packed breakfast, or just hunger — you get Angkor Wat itself nearly to yourself for about ninety minutes, in the best light of the day.

That is the single most useful thing in this post. The temple is far better at 06:45 than the sunrise was.

A woman in a long blue patterned skirt standing among the columns and galleries of Angkor Wat's upper level — The upper galleries at about quarter to seven. Almost nobody there.

A woman standing in the inner courtyard of Angkor Wat, surrounded by carved galleries and steep stone stairs — Inside the third enclosure. The scale of it does not photograph.

A woman standing in front of Angkor Wat and its reflecting pool in full morning sunlight, palm trees around — And then out again into proper daylight, with the crowd gone.

A woman walking a raised stone path toward one of Angkor Wat's library buildings under a deep blue sky — One of the libraries, which most people walk straight past on the way to the main temple.

Then the rest of it

Angkor is not one temple, it is several hundred spread over four hundred square kilometres. We did the small circuit and four more.

A stone gateway topped with a carved four-faced tower, surrounded by jungle — The face-tower gate at Banteay Kdei — quieter than anything else we saw all day.

A woman walking along a raised stone causeway toward a ruined temple, trees on either side — Nine o’clock, and we had this to ourselves.

Ta Prohm is the one left deliberately half-swallowed by the forest, and it earns the queue.

A woman standing beneath the enormous pale roots of a strangler fig pouring down over a temple wall at Ta Prohm — The trees are not decoration. They are what happens when you leave sandstone alone for five hundred years.

A man standing in a carved stone corridor at Ta Prohm, looking up at a decorated lintel — The corridors are the part people forget to look at.

A man sitting at the top of the very steep central stairs of Ta Keo, a stepped pyramid temple — Ta Keo, which was never finished and never carved. The steps are as steep as they look.

The dancers

And then Bayon, in the middle of Angkor Thom — the one with the faces — where the walls are covered in apsaras.

A carved stone relief of a dancing celestial figure on a lotus, flanked by two smaller dancing attendants — A dancing apsara at Bayon. Bent knee, flexed foot, and a hand position I have taught in a studio in Munich.

Small personal aside: I teach Indian classical dance, and I was not remotely ready for this. I’d assumed the connection would be vague — a shared root somewhere a long way back. It isn’t vague. It’s the same vocabulary. Same bent knee, same turned-out stance, same fingers. I stood there trying to work out which position it was and then realised I already knew, because I teach it. Nine hundred years old, two thousand kilometres from home, and I could have stepped straight into it.

Anyway — the point is that whatever you happen to know about, Angkor probably has some of it in there somewhere. Go and find your own thing in it rather than working down somebody’s list of the top five temples.

A man sitting in a stone window frame at Bayon, framed by carved columns and bright green trees beyond — Two o’clock, nine and a half hours in, and completely finished.

The day we did nothing, and why it belongs in this post

The next morning we got up late, and that was the entire plan.

A brunch table with eggs and avocado on toast, salad, two cappuccinos and a small cake — Brunch at eleven, which after the previous day felt close to a moral achievement.

Then the thing we had been doing all month, and doing properly this time.

The reception room of a spa in Siem Reap, with grey walls, blue cushioned benches, a wooden Buddha and a spirit house — The one appointment of the day.

Two massage beds side by side in a treatment room, with bolsters and woven baskets — Two beds, two hours, nothing else in the diary.

We had a massage every three or four days the whole way through the month, and it is the practical tip we would push hardest out of the entire month. A month of moving is physically harder than it sounds, and the difference between arriving somewhere fresh and arriving somewhere wrecked came down almost entirely to whether we had stopped for an hour in the previous few days.

Khmer massage is gentler than Thai — less stretching, less standing on you — and after nine and a half hours of climbing temple stairs it was exactly right. Book it for the day after your big day, not the day before.

A pink lotus flower folded open around a small dish, sitting on a banana leaf tray — They give you a lotus. Of course they do.

A small swimming pool with stone water spouts, the building reflected in the surface — The rest of the afternoon, in its entirety.

Building a nothing day into a fast trip feels wasteful right up until you have done it. It is the reason we arrived in Malaysia able to enjoy Malaysia.

Where we ate

Cambodian food does not have Vietnam’s reputation and we think that is a mistake. It is milder, sweeter, more coconut-driven, and quietly excellent.

A Siem Reap dinner of beef noodles and pineapple fried rice served in a carved pineapple half, with a dish of peanuts — Pineapple fried rice, which is served in the pineapple and is exactly as good as being nine years old.

Two margaritas on a table with the neon of Pub Street bars behind — One drink on Pub Street is the correct dose.

A lunch of fried rice and a whole young coconut with a pink straw, at an open-sided bamboo restaurant — Last lunch in Cambodia, and a coconut the size of a football.

Eat fish amok at least twice. Order the lok lak — peppered beef with a fried egg and a lime-and-black-pepper dip. And drink the coconuts, which cost about a dollar and come with a straw and no ceremony.

What we would do differently

We would add a night. Three was enough for one temple day and one rest day, but it left nothing for Banteay Srei — the small pink sandstone temple an hour out, which everybody who has seen it says is the finest carving in Cambodia — or for the floating villages on the Tonlé Sap. A fourth night would have bought one of those without touching the rest day, which we would not give up.

We would not try to add Phnom Penh. We considered it and decided against, and we were right. It is a five- or six-hour drive or a short flight, and doing it justice — the Royal Palace, and Tuol Sleng and the killing fields, which are the reason to go and are not something to squeeze in around an Angkor trip — needs two full days of its own and a different frame of mind. Do it as its own visit or not at all.

Where the money goes

Cambodia was the cheapest country of the month by a clear margin, with one large exception: the Angkor pass. At the time of writing it is around $37 for one day, $62 for three and $72 for a week, and it is worth every cent — but it is a real number and it lands all at once, so budget for it rather than being surprised at a ticket window at five in the morning.

After that, very little. A tuk-tuk for a full temple day is a modest fixed cost and your driver waits for you at every stop. Food is cheap, drinks are cheaper, and a good hotel with a pool costs less here than a mediocre room in Hoi An.

The country runs on US dollars. Prices are quoted in dollars, ATMs dispense dollars, and you will get Cambodian riel as small change instead of coins. Bring clean, unmarked notes; torn ones get refused.

Practical summary

Get the e-visa before you go. Cambodia issues an e-visa online, and visa on arrival also exists at the main airports. Use the official government site — there is an entire industry of near-identical sites charging several times the real fee. Check the current position for your passport before booking.

Dress code is enforced at the temples, properly and politely. Shoulders and knees covered for everyone. A long skirt or light trousers plus a t-shirt with sleeves is the answer, and you will be glad of the sun cover anyway.

Take a torch, water and a hat. You arrive in the dark and leave in the full heat of the afternoon.

Stay after the sunrise. Ninety minutes of a nearly empty Angkor Wat is the best thing in this post and it costs nothing but breakfast.

Book a tuk-tuk driver for the whole day, not per temple. Agree the route in advance and they will wait, hold your bag and know exactly where the shade is.

Put the rest day after the temple day. Not before.

Next: part five, Malaysia.

Travelspheric