Travel guides and useful notes from Cambodia, including Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Kampot, Kep, Bokor Mountain and practical route ideas.
A first route through Vietnam tends to keep moving: several regions linked by overnight trains and short flights, with the scenery changing every few days. A first route through Cambodia can afford to slow down: fewer bases, temple days that start early, and recent history that frames what you see. Both countries can be travelled…
Sihanoukville wasn’t the Cambodian beach town I expected. Instead of relaxed waterfront cafés, I found casino towers, unfinished buildings and beaches that looked nothing like the tropical postcards. Yet while I was walking through the city, Trip.com was showing modern four- and five-star hotels for surprisingly little money. And just offshore were private-island resorts where…
Most people visit Kep for its famous crab market. But just a few streets away from the seafood restaurants, abandoned villas reveal a very different side of this small Cambodian seaside town. Once a fashionable retreat for Cambodia’s elite, Kep is now an unusual mix of fishing boats, tropical greenery, modern resorts and the remains…
A room in a former Art Deco cinema, a bamboo bungalow suspended above the river, or a private-pool villa surrounded by tropical gardens? In Kampot, choosing where to stay is almost as interesting as deciding what to see. But there’s one thing worth knowing before you book: some of Kampot’s most beautiful riverside hotels are…
The Kampot Salt Fields are one of the easiest stops to add to a countryside trip in southern Cambodia, but timing makes all the difference. Visit during the dry season and you may see workers gathering white sea salt into piles. Come during the rains and you’ll find reflective ponds instead. You don’t need to…
Battambang was the stop I planned in detail and then never reached. I had worked out how to get there from Siem Reap, which part of the old town I wanted to explore, which Bamboo Train actually made sense, how to combine Phnom Banan with the countryside, and where to be before sunset for the…
Phnom Chhngok is not remarkable because it is large. It is remarkable because the cave itself became part of the temple. Inside a limestone hill near Kampot, a small pre-Angkorian brick sanctuary was built around a natural rock formation associated with a Shiva linga. The shrine is usually described as a 7th-century temple, although archaeological…
Tonle Sap Lake is often reduced to a “floating village tour” from Siem Reap. That makes it sound like a scenic boat ride past houses on water, when the reality is much bigger. Tonle Sap is Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake, but its size changes dramatically with the season. It is part of a river…
Phnom Kulen is often sold as a waterfall day trip from Siem Reap. That description misses most of the reason the mountain matters. Long before Angkor Wat, an early Khmer royal centre developed on this plateau. In later centuries, Hindu images and lingas were carved into riverbeds, rivers flowing from the massif fed the landscape…
At Angkor, the difficult part is not finding spectacular temples. It is understanding what you are looking at. After a few hours, names such as Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII can start blending together. Shiva, Vishnu and Buddha appear across different monuments, sometimes within the same temple. Nagas, Garudas, Buddha images, royal figures and carved…