Cambodia Recommendations

My stay in Cambodia only encompassed Siem Reap, where Angkor Wat is located, and at that only for three days. Still, I found Siem Reap to be a nice place to visit and three days seems just about right.

It’s a quaint little town that’s easy to get around with surprisingly good restaurants, good shops where you can buy local goods and a fair number of places for going out at night. There are a lot of good hotels too, although I happened to stay in a very average hostel which you might find below (i.e. not recommended).

Ultimately, however, it’s the temples of Angkor Wat that make a visit worthwhile and it’s a must for anyone slightly interested in Southeast Asia, Cambodia or one of the world’s most mythic and revered archaeological sites.

The following are a few places that made my short time in Siem Reap enjoyable:

• Soup Dragon - a good restaurant on a corner on the main street of top flight restaurants featuring good quality local (Khmer) and Vietnamese cuisine, plus a good selection of sandwiches.
• Viva! - offers a Tex-Mex menu that’s surprisingly good considering it seems very out of place in the middle of Cambodia. Friendly staff and nice outside tables on a corner.
• Blue Pumpkin - excellent bakeshop/ice cream parlor that makes great bread, muffins and other baked goods. The ice cream’s pretty tasty too. They have a restaurant upstairs, but I didn’t eat there for dinner as I was generally content to sample the baked goods in the street level shop.
• Angkor Wat - the centerpiece of the Khmer city that’s made up of multiple temple and palace sites around the area. It’s been well preserved and very interesting to wander through all the corridors, courtyards and temples to see how Angkor Wat was centuries ago.
• Angkor Thom/Bayon - A good, though small, site of an old temple with interesting catacombs to wander around beneath the main structure.
• Phreah Khan - decent sized and interesting for the numerous corridors that make up this site. It’s in various states of preservation and disrepair which makes wandering through it’s different twists and turns interesting because you never know what you’ll find in each direction.
• Ta Phrom - the best site by far with massive trees & roots growing through the old temples and even on top in many cases. It gives you a great idea of what the other temples looked like when they were originally found. Something new, different and interesting around every corner of the temple grounds and you could spend hours exploring or just marveling at the unique combination of nature and temple. It’s also where parts of Tomb Raider (Angelina Jolie - Lara Croft) and the first Indiana Jones were filmed.