Author: Oli

We made only three stops during our 11-day stay in Cambodia. We started by paying a visit to the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, before learning to cook Cambodia’s national dish in Battambang, and finally spending three days exploring the ancient temples of Angkor by bicycle.

Carbon 🚆

Our travel across Cambodia emitted less carbon than any country we’ve visited since leaving London. This is primarily because Cambodia is a relatively compact country, so we travelled much less distance than than we did elsewhere. We also travelled 98% of the distance by train or coach, which helped keep our footprint small.

We wish we’d recorded from the beginning how far we’d travelled by bicycle – the kilometres are starting to add up!

Cost 💰

Cambodia was the second most affordable country we’ve visited, after Georgia. However, given our relatively short stay in Cambodia, the per-day cost of our visas was pretty high. The tickets to explore the temples of Angkor also seemed relatively expensive when compared to the very affordable food and accommodation costs.

Cats 🐈

We were delighted to find that Khmer people love their cats. As a result, cats were plentiful across Cambodia, and the country has secured third place in the league table. It’s been quite a while since any country has held a candle to Greece and Turkey’s scores last summer, and we thoroughly enjoyed interrupting every other conversation with some casual cat spotting again.

And of course there were a few stand out winners…

🏅Most effective hawkers

We made a number of purchases from this store above the market rate, but it was worth it to spend some time with these fourteen (!) cats. I asked the lady running the shop why they had quite so many cats – apparently they are all part of the same family, from grand-parents to grand-children. There were no signs of the cats during the day, but each night they came out to take the cool evening air. They were attracting a lot of attention!

🏅Most photogenic cat

Who can blame this chap for cat-napping in the shade given the borderline-oppressive afternoon heat?

🏅Pest control employee of the month

We often accuse cats of living rent free in someone else’s home, but this one seemed to be earning his keep as chief of pest control. Just look at the size of that rat!

🏅Most casual temple monkey

Okay this one is obviously not a cat, but I always love how proficient monkeys are at stealing from tourists. I mean, why bother foraging from nature when humans walk right past your nose carrying more food than you could ever eat? The chap below had just looted someone’s carrier bag for a bottle of water and had the cap off within seconds, before drinking from it just like a human would.

Culture 👨‍👩‍👧

💵 We were really surprised to discover the extent to which US Dollars and Cambodian Riel are used in combination – In many countries, it’s normal for tourism-related activities to be priced in Dollars, but I’ve never been anywhere that used two currencies completely interchangeably. Even if a purchase was priced in Riel, it was perfectly legitimate to pay in Dollars (or vice versa) without even asking first, using the well-known exchange rate of 4,000 Riel to the Dollar. Dollars seemed slightly more common for larger purchases, while Riel were used for fractions of a Dollar. In fact, it was even possible to make payments and receive change using a mix of both currencies in a single transaction, providing us a great opportunity to practise our four-times-table at every purchase.

🚙 The wealth gap was on full display in Phnom Penh – There was a strange mix of vehicles on the roads of the capital, with brand new, white SUVs with blacked out windows at one extreme, and mopeds and ancient tuk-tuks at the other, and really not a lot in between.

🧒 The Khmer are a friendly bunch – Everywhere we went (and particularly when cycling around Battambang), kids would smile, wave and shout a “Hello!” as we passed. But it wasn’t even just young children – I remember a lady waving at me as our train departed an interim stop on its route to Battambang as if it were the Titanic leaving to cross an ocean. We loved it, even if our arms started to ache after a while from all the waving.

👑 We’ve never seen so much gold paint before – Thailand is probably a close second, but Cambodia surely must take the crown for the highest annual bill for gold paint of anywhere in the world! Everywhere we looked, there was something painted in a gaudy (but jolly) shade of gold.

🍚 Khmer cuisine was a beautiful fusion of familiar cuisines – We were interested to learn that many Cambodian dishes bore many similarities to their neighbours in Vietnam and Thailand. Maybe this shouldn’t have been too surprising, given that the Khmer Empire covered large chunks of both of these countries for many centuries. Either way, we had a delicious 11 days!

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Beyond Cambodia, our journey continued west into Thailand, home to some of the spiciest food in the world 🥵

As one of the finalists for the seven wonders of the modern world, the temples of Angkor are a proper bucket-list experience. On top of this, Angkor Wat also makes an appearance in Age of Empires (one of my favourite video games). I was really excited to see it with my own eyes, and managed to convince Sara into a three-day itinerary of temple exploration.

However, temple fatigue is real thing. The Angkor park is huge – it contains literally hundreds of temples, and the afternoon heat and sun certainly aren’t the ideal conditions to be climbing temple steps. Our strategy was to pace ourselves, make use of the cooler mornings, and gradually work up the highlights (which we saved for day three).

Almost everyone gets around the Angkor park by tuk-tuk. The distances are just too great to walk, and for some reason, tourists aren’t allowed to hire motorbikes in Siem Reap. But of course neither of these are really our style, so instead we opted to hire a couple of city bikes to get around. Thank goodness these bikes were in good condition and the going was relatively flat, because we covered nearly 100 km on them over the next three days.

Day 1: The Roluos temples (30 km cycled)

We started well off the beaten path with a visit to the Roluos group of temples, located 13 km east of Siem Reap (where we were staying). The route to these temples goes along the main road between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, so it was probably the least relaxing cycle of our stay.

This group consists of a trio of temples; Bakong, Preah Ko, and Lolei. These are the oldest in the Angkor area, with each temple being completed between 879 and 893 AD.

Despite the slight slog of a journey, arriving at the temples was immensely rewarding. Not only did we have each temple to ourselves for at least some of the time, but we were also the only ones brave (or stupid) enough to have attempted the journey on bicycles. In fact, there were about ten times as many children cycling to and from school (past the temples) as there were tourists. I did wonder what it must be like growing up cycling past ancient temples on your school commute – let’s just say it was a bit of a contrast to the bus I used to take to my primary school in Eltham.

Day 2: The grand circuit (40 km cycled)

On our second day we upped the temple tempo with a lap around the “grand circuit” road. We left the hotel shortly after sunrise and powered through the first 13 km to Ta Prohm temple. This temple had been abandoned for so long that it had been gradually reclaimed by nature, with trees literally growing straight out of a few towers, while some walls have become so entangled with roots that I’m pretty sure they’re now holding up what’s left of the wall.

This temple also featured in the 2001 movie Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie, and it’s not hard to see why this location was selected.

Next, we cycled 10 km through dense forest to reach Neak Pean, a small temple located right in the middle of a massive rectangular lake, connected to the lake shore via a long and sunbaked boardwalk. The temple itself was beautifully serene, and rather confusingly set in a mini-lake within an island in the centre of the larger lake.

Just 2 km along the grand circuit road is Preah Khan, yet another stunning temple. Unbeknownst to us, we approached this temple from the lesser-used East Entrance, and were confused by just how few fellow tourists were about. We’d later realise that this is actually a great strategy to explore temples while also avoiding the largest tour groups!

Unlike Ta Promh (the Tomb Raider temple), Preah Khan has been extensively restored, allowing visitors to get a feeling for how the temple must have felt in its prime. The video below shows me walking only half of the temple’s length, so you can imagine how much more there was to see!

We rounded off the day with a cycle through Ankor Thom – the 9 km² final capital of the Khmer empire. This involved passing through one of the four giant gates in the city walls.

This was where cycling really came into its own, as it afforded us incredible views of the ancient constructions and also gave us the option to pause at any point to savour the views.

And just as we were starting to run out of steam, we caught our first glimpse of Angkor Wat. The afternoon sun had cast a golden glow over its many towers, and it would have been rude not to stop to catch our breath.

Day 3: Angkor Wat at sunrise (24 km cycled)

We left our hotel at 5:20am and cycled through the night to reach Angkor Wat before dawn. Sunrise at this temple is a big deal and features on almost every itinerary, and we’d read some pretty disappointed tales about just how crowded it can get. So while thousands of people jostled for position outside the west gate, we doubled down on our strategy of heading to the “wrong” gate and approached from the east. We passed through the temple gate at 6.02am, just as the cicadas abruptly broke out into song and the first light appeared in the sky, and within seconds the chorus was nearly deafening.

Exploring the empty temple in the pre-dawn light was absolutely breathtaking, and we did our best to enjoy the moment as well as snap a few photos. We genuinely couldn’t believe that we had one of the world’s busiest sights all to ourselves.

After a half-lap of the temple, we emerged opposite the west gate, and could see hoards of fellow visitors heading up through the main entrance directly towards us.

We made an abrupt about-turn, and with sunrise imminent, made a beeline for a perch protruding from the north side of the temple that we’d scoped out as a good spot.

Here, we tucked into our breakfast boxes of hard-boiled eggs, bread and marmalade as the sun rose. It’s not often we get up before sunrise (let alone arrive at our destination!) but my goodness was it worth it.

We spent the rest of the morning exploring the other temples within Angkor Thom. At its centre is Bayon temple, a huge (if slightly bizarre) temple featuring 216 giant faces which apparently resembled the king who had ordered the temple’s construction. Many of the faces aren’t immediately apparent following roughly 800 years of weathering, but it’s one of those situations where the more you look, the more you find peering back at you from the rock.

Finally, we deployed what little energy we had left to climb the (incredibly steep) steps of Baphuon temple. In addition to offering great views from its top level, this temple also has an interesting backstory of relatively recent history. In the 1960s, it was painstakingly disassembled for restoration, block by block, and meticulously catalogued to allow it to be reassembled again. However, the Khmer Rouge regime who took power in 1970s did not approve of such activity, and destroyed the records. This left behind one of the world’s largest (and heaviest!) jigsaw puzzles, which has since only been partially completed. The thousands of stone blocks that still cover the area surrounding the temple are evidence of how much work still remains. It slightly reminds me of the handful of screws that I often have left over after taking something apart and putting it back together again, though I guess I don’t have such a good excuse.

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While our stay in Siem Reap was longer than we’ve stayed anywhere for months now, I’m so glad we had the time to do it some justice. And with that, our somewhat brief foray into Cambodia was over already, as we boarded an 8.5-hour bus to Bangkok, the beating heart of Thailand.