Cambodia is more than three days at Angkor

Angkor is not a temple. It is roughly 400 square kilometres of a medieval capital, of which most visitors see four buildings. The scale is the point: Angkor Wat alone covers about 160 hectares inside its moat, and the Bayon, Ta Prohm and the terraces of Angkor Thom are a separate city three kilometres to the north. A one-day ticket is a way of not seeing it.

The honest part: the central temples between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon are now hard work, and not because of the stone. Sunrise at Angkor Wat draws a crowd several hundred deep along the northern pond, which some people find remarkable and most find a queue. Pub Street in Siem Reap is a bar strip that could be anywhere. The floating village tours on the Tonle Sap run a spectrum from genuine to openly staged, and the difference is not visible from the boat ticket — it is visible from which operator sold it to you.

Away from that, the country is close to empty. Battambang has a colonial-era grid and a working art scene and almost no foreign visitors on a weekday. Kampong Cham and Kratie sit on a Mekong that is a kilometre wide with sandbanks in the dry season. Kampot and Kep on the south coast have pepper farms, crab markets and old French villas, and prices that have barely moved. The reason our eight-day route spends half its nights outside Siem Reap is not variety for its own sake — it is that the rest of the country is the part with room in it.

Cambodia has two seasons and one month everybody warns you about. November to February is dry and the mornings are around 22 to 25 degrees, which is the only time of year when standing on stone at eleven in the morning is tolerable. March warms to the mid-thirties. April is the hard month: 36 to 40 degrees in the shade at Angkor, and the Khmer new year in mid-April closes offices and fills every domestic road.

What the wet season gives you in return is real. From June to October the moats fill, the Tonle Sap roughly quadruples in surface area and reverses the flow of its own river, the dust stops and the stone goes dark green with moss. Rain usually arrives as a heavy hour in the afternoon rather than all-day drizzle, hotel rates drop by 30 to 40 per cent, and the sunrise crowd at Angkor Wat thins to a fraction of its December size. We run trips in September and are happy to explain why.

The two weeks to avoid if you can move: mid-April for the new year, and the Water Festival in November, when Phnom Penh gains an enormous domestic crowd and the riverfront closes.

Cambodia is the cheapest of the three countries for rooms and food and the most expensive for entry fees, which catches people out when they budget. The Angkor pass alone is USD 62 per person for three days, and it is not included in any ticket you can negotiate.

Two of our routes cover Cambodia. The eight-day Angkor and Mekong route is the country on its own, with three nights at the temples and the rest on the river and in Phnom Penh. The fifteen-day Indochina route ends here with two nights and two temple sessions, which is the right amount when Cambodia is the last of three countries rather than the whole trip.

Four reasons to skip it, or to move the dates.

• You only have three or four nights and Angkor is the only thing you want. That is a legitimate stopover, but it is not a trip to Cambodia and we would rather you added it to a Vietnam route than booked it as one.
• You are travelling in April and cannot change. Forty degrees on unshaded stone is not a minor inconvenience; it ends temple mornings by ten and it is dangerous for older travellers and small children.
• You want mountains, cool air or hill walking. Cambodia is flat and hot. The Cardamoms exist but the infrastructure for walking them does not, at the standard we would put a guest into. Northern Vietnam or northern Laos is the answer.
• You are unwilling to encounter the Khmer Rouge period. Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are hard, and Cambodians will raise the years between 1975 and 1979 in ordinary conversation because nearly every family lost someone. You can skip the sites; you cannot skip the history, and pretending otherwise makes for a strange trip.
• Persistent, organised child begging around the temples upsets you into giving money. It is a real problem here, the money sustains it, and your guide will ask you not to. If that instruction would ruin your day, this is worth knowing now.