Angkor properly, then the rest of Cambodia

Day 1

Arrive Siem Reap

Siem Reap's international airport moved east in 2023 and now sits about 50 kilometres from town, a 50-minute drive rather than the fifteen minutes older guidebooks promise. We meet you inside the terminal and drive straight in.

Nothing else is scheduled. Tomorrow starts at 05:15 and the heat is the part of Angkor that people underestimate, so an afternoon spent in the pool is not a wasted one.

Day 2

Angkor, early morning and late afternoon

The Angkor Wat causeway between 05:45 and 07:00, before the coach park fills

Out at 05:15 with the three-day pass bought the evening before, so you are on the western causeway of Angkor Wat at about 05:45 rather than queuing for a ticket at 06:10. Two hours inside the main temple, then Angkor Thom and the Bayon while the stone is still bearable. Back at the hotel by 11:00.

The middle of the day is yours. We go out again at 15:15 for Ta Prohm, which is the temple left half-swallowed by silk-cotton and strangler fig, and finish at Preah Khan, which has similar trees and a fifth of the visitors.

Splitting the day in two costs an extra vehicle movement and saves you four hours in 34-degree heat. Every guest who has done it the other way tells us the same thing afterwards.

Day 3

Banteay Srei and Beng Mealea

The north gallery at Beng Mealea around midday, often with nobody else in it

Banteay Srei is 37 kilometres north-east, about 50 minutes on a good road. It is small and you will be done in an hour, which is the correct amount of time: what you go for is the carving, cut into a pink sandstone that holds detail no other temple here keeps.

Another 40 kilometres east and an hour on is Beng Mealea, built around the same time as Angkor Wat and never restored. It is a collapsed building crossed on wooden walkways and stairs. The site was mined during the civil war and cleared by Cambodian deminers in the early 2000s; the cleared area is marked and you stay inside it.

Back in Siem Reap by mid-afternoon, 77 kilometres and about an hour and a half.

Day 4

The lake, then west to Battambang

The flooded forest in October, when the boat runs between treetops

Kampong Phluk is 30 kilometres south-east, 45 minutes by road and then an hour and a half by boat. The houses stand on stilts six to eight metres high because they have to: the Tonle Sap covers roughly 2,500 square kilometres in April and about 13,000 in late September, when the Mekong is high enough to push the river backwards into the lake.

That seasonal difference decides what this morning is. From August to December you go through the tops of the flooded forest with water under you. From March to May the boats work a narrow channel and the stilt houses stand over dry ground, which is interesting in a different and much less photogenic way.

Afternoon west to Battambang, 170 kilometres on national roads 6 and 5, about three and a half hours. In high water we can swap the road for the Sangker river boat instead, which takes seven hours on a hard bench and is worth it to about one traveller in four.

Day 5

Battambang, town and the country behind it

The morning goes south of town. Wat Banan is an eleventh-century hilltop temple reached by 358 steps, and the view from the top is over rice country rather than jungle. Phnom Sampov, ten minutes further on, holds caves used as execution sites by the Khmer Rouge; there is a small memorial and our guide will tell you what happened there without theatre. At about 17:45 several million wrinkle-lipped bats leave the same hill in a column that takes half an hour to pass, which is a separate thing and worth staying for.

Between the two we stop at the family workshops along the road: rice paper dried on bamboo racks, fish paste, banana chips, and the bamboo norry, a plank on two axles that used to be a real form of transport and is now a rebuilt three-kilometre ride.

Afternoon in Battambang itself, which has the best surviving street of 1920s shophouses in Cambodia and almost no traffic. Phare Ponleu Selpak, the arts school on the edge of town, runs a circus performance most evenings in season, and the ticket money goes into the school.

Day 6

Battambang to Phnom Penh

Leave at 08:00 for 290 kilometres of national road 5, now mostly rebuilt, about five hours with a lunch stop at Pursat. It is flat rice country the whole way and there is not a great deal to look at, which is why we do it in one push rather than pretending it is a sightseeing day.

Arriving mid-afternoon leaves the evening free on the riverfront, where the Tonle Sap runs into the Mekong in front of the palace. Phnom Penh is a working capital of about two and a half million people and behaves like one; the traffic at 18:00 is the price of that.

Day 7

Phnom Penh

The morning is Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek. Tuol Sleng was a school before it became security prison S-21, where about fourteen thousand people were held between 1975 and 1979 and a dozen are known to have survived. Choeung Ek is fifteen kilometres out, thirty-five minutes in traffic, and is where most of them were killed. We give you the audio guide, which is well made and lets you go at your own pace, and the guide waits outside rather than narrating.

We do not build this into a shortened version and we do not schedule anything immediately afterwards. If you would rather not go, say so when you book and we will put the Royal Palace and a market morning in its place; nobody will ask you to justify it.

The afternoon is the National Museum, which holds the pre-Angkorian and Angkorian sculpture taken out of the temples you walked through on days two and three, and the Royal Palace, which closes between 11:00 and 14:00 and needs covered shoulders and knees.

Day 8

Depart Phnom Penh

Free until your transfer. The airport is ten kilometres from the centre, which is thirty minutes early in the morning and can be forty-five later on, and we ask for three hours before an international departure.