Siem Reap: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Angkor Wat was built by Suryavarman II from about 1113 and it is the largest religious structure ever raised: the moat alone is a kilometre and a half by one and three, and the stone — some five million tonnes of sandstone — was floated down canals from the Kulen hills forty kilometres away. It is also the only Khmer state temple dedicated to Vishnu and the only one that faces west, which is why most scholars read it as a funerary monument for the king who built it. This walk is the temple itself and then three kilometres north to the hill that held the capital two centuries earlier. Three hours. Start at opening, bring water, and cover shoulders and knees or you will not be allowed up to the top level.

A short history of Siem Reap

From the 9th to the 15th century this was the capital of the Khmer Empire. In the early 12th century, in the reign of King Suryavarman II, the temple of Angkor Wat was built, one of the largest religious buildings in the world, and at the end of that century Jayavarman VII built Angkor Thom. After the capital was abandoned, the temples were never entirely forgotten, but it was only the writings of Henri Mouhot from 1860 that made them known in Europe. In 1907 Siam returned the province to Cambodia. In 1992 Angkor was declared a World Heritage Site, and Siem Reap grew from a village into a tourist town.

The ten best sights in Siem Reap

1
Angkor Wat
Faces west, which almost no Khmer temple does, and that is why it is thought to be a tomb. Angkor pass $37 one day, $62 three days, $72 seven days. Verified 10/2026
2
Angkor Wat west causeway
The sunrise spot, and it is genuinely crowded by half past five; the moat is 1.5 by 1.3 kilometres
3
The Bayon
Over two hundred carved faces on fifty-four towers; nobody agrees whose face it is
4
Angkor Thom south gate
Fifty-four gods on one side of the causeway and fifty-four demons on the other, pulling a serpent
5
Angkor Thom victory gate
The quiet way in from the east; four gates face the compass and the fifth is only for the king
6
Angkor Thom north gate
The least used gate and the best preserved faces on it; take it towards Preah Khan and Neak Pean
7
Angkor Thom west gate
Half ruined and reached on a dirt track; almost nobody comes here and that is the appeal
8
The Baphuon
Taken apart stone by stone by the French, and the plans were lost in the war — it took 51 years to rebuild
9
Phimeanakas
The royal palace enclosure; the wooden palace itself is gone and only its bathing pools remain
10
Terrace of the Leper King
Six tiers of carved underworld figures, found hidden behind a later wall

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What is an audio walk?

Tours in Siem Reap →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Siem Reap:

Free walking tours in Siem Reap

Angkor Wat and the hill

The west causeway · Two hundred metres of sandstone across the moat, and it is the front door for a reason — every other Khmer state temple faces east, towards the sunrise, and this one faces west, towards the setting sun and the direction of death. The southern half of the causeway is original twelfth-century work; the northern half was rebuilt by a Japanese team in the 1990s, and you can see the join underfoot. The temple appears on the Cambodian flag, which makes it the only building on any national flag in the world.
The gallery of bas-reliefs · The outer gallery carries about six hundred metres of continuous carved relief, roughly two metres high, and it is a single commissioned programme rather than decoration. The east gallery holds the Churning of the Sea of Milk — eighty-eight demons and ninety-two gods pulling a serpent wrapped round a mountain to make the elixir of immortality — and the south gallery holds a historical panel showing Suryavarman II himself on an elephant, one of the very few portraits of a named Khmer king. Walk it anticlockwise; that is the direction for funerary ritual, and it is also the order the stories are told in.
The libraries and the cruciform cloister · The two small buildings inside the first enclosure are called libraries by convention; nobody knows what they held, and they have no windows. Beyond them the cruciform cloister once had four sunken basins that were filled with water so the towers would reflect in them, and the pillars around it are covered in pilgrims’ inscriptions in Khmer, Burmese and Japanese — a Japanese traveller in 1632 wrote on one that he believed he was standing in the Jetavana garden in India, which is how completely the place had been forgotten.
Ta Prohm Kel · A small ruined chapel on the roadside just north of the moat, which almost everyone drives past. It was one of a hundred and two hospital chapels that Jayavarman VII built across the empire at the end of the twelfth century, recorded in his own inscriptions: each had a staff, a stock of medicines listed by name, and a statue of the healing Buddha. This is the only one you can touch on the way out of Angkor Wat, and it is the best evidence that the empire built more than temples.
Baksei Chamkrong · A brick-and-laterite step pyramid finished in 947, and the only Angkorian temple whose foundation inscription survives complete with a full dynastic genealogy — it names the kings back to the founding of the empire, which is how much of the chronology is known at all. It is tiny, the steps are near vertical, and it takes four minutes. The name means the bird that shelters under its wings, from a legend about a king saved from his enemies by a giant bird.
Phnom Bakheng · The first state temple built at Angkor, consecrated in 907 by Yasovarman I, on the only hill on the plain — the city he founded around it was called Yasodharapura, and Angkor Wat came two hundred years later. It originally carried a hundred and eight towers arranged so that from any side you could see exactly thirty-three, the number of gods on Mount Meru. The hill is now the sunset viewpoint and the number of people allowed on the top platform is capped, so the queue starts well before five.

Angkor Thom, the walled city

Angkor Thom is not a temple but a city: nine square kilometres inside an eight-metre wall and a hundred-metre moat, laid out by Jayavarman VII around 1200 after the Cham sacked the old capital. Lidar surveys flown in 2012 and 2015 showed that greater Angkor sprawled over something like a thousand square kilometres of canals, reservoirs and house mounds, holding perhaps three-quarters of a million people — the largest pre-industrial city on earth. What you walk through here is the ceremonial core of it, and everything that was wood has gone, so what remains is the stone skeleton of a city. Two and a half hours on foot between the south gate and the royal square. Go in the morning; there is no shade on the terraces.

The south gate · The causeway over the moat is lined with two rows of giant figures pulling a serpent: fifty-four gods on the left and fifty-four demons on the right, repeating the Churning of the Sea of Milk at city scale and making the whole gate an act of cosmic engineering. The gods have almond eyes and the demons bulge; many heads are replacements, and the originals that were stolen in the seventies are scattered through museums abroad. Above the gate is a tower with four faces, one looking down each road.
The Bayon · Fifty-four towers, each carved with four faces, giving something over two hundred of them — the count varies because some are fragments. Whether the face is the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the king himself, or deliberately both at once has never been settled, and the ambiguity is probably the point: Jayavarman VII was the first Khmer king to make Buddhism the state religion, and after his death the temple was partly re-carved for Hindu worship, which is why some reliefs are chiselled out. The outer gallery, unusually, shows ordinary life — a market, a cockfight, a woman giving birth, and a naval battle against the Cham.
The Baphuon · An eleventh-century temple-mountain that the French began dismantling in 1960 under the anastylosis method — take it apart, number every block, rebuild it on a sound core. Three hundred thousand stones were laid out in the forest, and then the war came, the project stopped in 1970, and the records were destroyed under the Khmer Rouge. Work restarted in 1995 with the blocks and no plan, and the temple reopened in 2011: fifty-one years, and it is the largest three-dimensional jigsaw ever completed. On the west side is a reclining Buddha nine metres long, assembled from the temple’s own stones in the sixteenth century.
Phimeanakas and the royal pools · This walled enclosure was the royal palace, and the palace is simply not here — it was built of wood, as all Khmer domestic architecture was, and nothing of it survives but the stone temple at its centre and two bathing pools. Zhou Daguan, a Chinese envoy who lived at Angkor in 1296 and wrote the only outside description of the city as a living place, reported that the king slept in the golden tower and that a nine-headed serpent spirit took the form of a woman there each night. His account is also where we learn that the palace roofs were lead and the women of the court shaved their eyebrows.
The Terrace of the Leper King · A small platform whose outer wall was found, during restoration, to be a later skin built in front of an earlier one — so the archaeologists opened a trench between them, and you now walk down a narrow corridor with six registers of carved underworld figures on the inner wall that nobody saw for centuries and which are consequently almost undamaged. The name comes from a statue found on top, whose pitted stone was read by locals as a king with leprosy; it is actually Yama, the judge of the dead.
Prasat Suor Prat · Twelve laterite towers in a row facing the royal square, and their purpose is genuinely unknown. The name people use means the towers of the rope dancers, from a tradition that acrobats performed on ropes strung between them. Zhou Daguan recorded something stranger in 1296: that when two men had a dispute that could not be judged, each was shut in one of the towers for two or three days, and whichever came out with a boil, an ulcer or a fever was held to be in the wrong.

The town, not the temples

Siem Reap the town is barely a hundred and twenty years old: it was a cluster of villages around a river until the French rediscovered Angkor and built a road, and almost everything standing here was put up after 1993, when the UN mission ended and the first charter flights came. Then in 2020 the border closed, the tourists vanished overnight and the town lost nearly all of its income in a week — the shuttered shopfronts you still see are from that. This walk is deliberately not about Angkor: two working monasteries, the river, the market the town shops in, and the two hundred metres that pay for everything. Ninety minutes, flat, and the best hour is from five.

The Old Market · Psar Chas is the original market and the reason the modern town sits where it does. The front rows are souvenirs now, but walk to the back and it is still fish, pork, herbs and palm sugar sold to people who live here, with the wet section running until about noon. One practical thing you learn here and nowhere else: Cambodia runs on United States dollars, prices are quoted in them, ATMs dispense them — and change under a dollar comes back in riel at four thousand to the dollar, which is a fixed rate everyone uses.
Wat Preah Prom Rath · The town’s main pagoda, two minutes from the market and free, and the thing to look for is the reclining Buddha in the hall by the river: the story told here is that it was carved from the hull of a boat that ran aground at this spot, which is why the monastery stands here at all. The painted panels around the main temple are a complete illustrated life of the Buddha, redone in the nineties — almost every pagoda in Cambodia lost its paintings and its monks in the seventies, and most of what you see is restoration.
The river and the Heritage Walk · The Siem Reap River is not a natural river where it matters: the Khmer engineers of Angkor diverted and canalised water across this plain on a scale that lidar later measured in hundreds of kilometres of channels, and the current debate about why Angkor was abandoned in the fifteenth century centres on that system failing — a sequence of extreme droughts and then monsoons that silted and broke the canals. The promenade through town is the only part of Siem Reap laid out for walking, and at dusk the fruit bats leave the big trees by the Royal Gardens in one stream.
Wat Bo · One of the oldest pagodas in the town, from the eighteenth century, and the reason to come is the wall painting inside the main hall: a nineteenth-century cycle of the Reamker, the Khmer version of the Ramayana, and among the oldest surviving temple murals in Cambodia. Look at the clothing — the painters put the characters in nineteenth-century Khmer dress and included French colonial figures smoking pipes in the crowd scenes, which makes it a dated document as well as a religious one.
Wat Damnak · The name means the palace, because this was a royal residence before it became a monastery — King Sisowath stayed here. Inside the grounds is the Centre for Khmer Studies, with the best open library in the country outside Phnom Penh, and it exists for a specific reason: the Khmer Rouge destroyed books and killed the educated as policy, and by 1979 the country had almost no surviving academic infrastructure. Anyone can walk into the reading room.
Pub Street and Street 9 · Pub Street is the official name on the sign, which tells you most of what you need to know: the lane was renamed for what it became. Two hundred metres, closed to traffic from five, and it is the economic engine of the whole province — Siem Reap province depends on tourism for the overwhelming majority of its income, and this street and the temple pass are most of it. Walk one block north to Street 9 and the volume drops by half, the prices drop with it, and the people at the tables are as likely to be living here as visiting.

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Getting to Siem Reap and getting around

Siem Reap–Angkor International Airport · Opened October 2023 and sits 40 kilometres east — the old airport was shut because jets flew over the temples
The old airport · Seven kilometres out and closed to passengers since 2023; the runway pointed straight at Angkor
Siem Reap Bus Station · Phnom Penh is six hours, Battambang four, Bangkok nine with a border crossing in the middle
Chong Kneas boat dock · The Tonle Sap dock, 15 kilometres south; the closest floating village and the most commercialised
Charles de Gaulle Road · The road to Angkor — six kilometres, and a tuk-tuk for the day is the standard way to do the park

Cheap eats in Siem Reap

Khmer food is not Thai with less chilli — it is barely spicy at all, and it is built on prahok, a fermented fish paste that is the backbone of almost every savoury dish, and on kroeung, a pounded paste of lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, kaffir lime and garlic. Breakfast is the serious meal here and it is noodles or pork and rice, eaten between six and nine from carts and shophouses. Two to five dollars a plate — and prices are in actual US dollars, with change under a dollar given in riel at four thousand to the dollar.

Num banh chok · Breakfast noodles with fish gravy, a dollar; sold from shoulder baskets and gone by nine
Bai sach chrouk · Grilled pork over rice with pickles and a bowl of broth, a dollar and a half. Morning only
Fish amok · The national dish; four to six dollars, and the real version is steamed in banana leaf, not a curry in a bowl
Lok lak and Kampot pepper · Seared beef with a lime-and-pepper dip, four dollars; the dip is the dish
Red tree ants with beef · A real Siem Reap dish, not a dare; the ants are sour and they replace lime. Three dollars
Kralan · Sticky rice, beans and coconut roasted inside a bamboo tube; a dollar, from roadside stalls
Palm sugar and palm wine · Tapped from the sugar palm, Cambodia’s national tree; sold in discs at every roadside
Kuy teav · Clear pork-bone noodle soup, the other breakfast; a dollar and a half and every corner has one
Khmer barbecue · A domed grill over coals at your own table with broth in the moat around it; five dollars a head
The insect stalls · Crickets, silkworms and tarantula; genuinely eaten here, and salted rather than seasoned

Museums in Siem Reap

There is one museum here about Angkor and four about the forty years after it — the war, the mines and the crafts that were nearly lost. That proportion is honest: the temples are outside and they explain themselves badly, while the recent history is not visible anywhere in the landscape and has to be told. Go to the Angkor museum before the park rather than after, and give the small ones an hour each; two of them are run by the people the story happened to.

Angkor National Museum · Air conditioned, in town, and an hour and a half; go before the park, not after
APOPO Visitor Centre · Twenty minutes and you meet a working rat; the clearest explanation of the mine problem in town
Cambodia Landmine Museum · On the Banteay Srei road; founded by a man conscripted as a child soldier at ten
Artisans Angkor · A working workshop, not a showroom; the free guided walk through the ateliers is a real tour
Theam’s House · A lacquer artist’s own home and studio, open to visitors; small, personal and not a gift shop
War Museum Cambodia · An open yard of tanks, a MiG and a helicopter; the guides fought in them and that is the exhibit
Angkor Handicraft Association · Thirty-odd member workshops under one roof, fixed prices, and each maker is named

Holy places in Siem Reap

Cambodia is about ninety-five per cent Theravada Buddhist, and the pagoda is still the centre of village life — it is the school, the hall, the hospice and the cemetery. That is also what makes the seventies unforgettable here: monks were defrocked or killed, pagodas were turned into stores and prisons, and of some sixty thousand monks in 1975 a few thousand were alive in 1979. Every monastery you walk into was rebuilt and repopulated within living memory. Shoes come off at the step, shoulders and knees are covered, and women do not hand anything directly to a monk.

Wat Thmey · A glass stupa of bones found on this ground; three kilometres from Pub Street and almost always empty
Wat Bo · Eighteenth century; the Reamker murals inside are among the oldest in Cambodia
Tep Pranam · A six-metre Buddha still in worship on a ninth-century terrace inside Angkor Thom
Wat Preah Prom Rath · The town pagoda by the river, free and open all day; the reclining Buddha is the thing to find
Wat Damnak · A former royal residence; the Centre for Khmer Studies library inside is open to anyone
Wat Kesararam · The silver pagoda on the airport road, painted ceilings, and nobody in it
Wat Athvea · A twelfth-century temple with a living monastery beside it, four kilometres south and free

Nature and day trips near Siem Reap

The single biggest natural fact about this place is that the lake south of town reverses direction twice a year. From June the Mekong rises so high that it backs up the Tonle Sap river and pushes water inland, the lake swells from about two and a half thousand square kilometres to over fifteen thousand and from a metre deep to nine, and in October it drains back out. That pulse is the reason the Khmer Empire could feed three-quarters of a million people here, and it is still the largest freshwater fishery in the world. Everything in this group is dry season or wet season, never both.

Kampong Phluk · Stilt villages twenty kilometres out; go September to January when there is water under them
Phnom Kulen · Forty kilometres out; where the empire was declared in 802 and where its sandstone was cut
Kbal Spean · A 1.5 kilometre uphill walk to carvings in the riverbed; dry season shows the stone, wet season the water
Kampong Khleang · Forty kilometres out, the largest lake settlement and the least visited; a full day
Mechrey · A smaller village west of Chong Kneas with birds rather than souvenir boats
Phnom Krom · A ninth-century temple on the hill over the lake; sunset here is over the Tonle Sap itself
West Baray · An eleventh-century reservoir eight kilometres long that still holds water; locals swim here at weekends
Biodiversity Centre (ACCB) · A rescue centre for confiscated wildlife by Kbal Spean; one guided tour a day, booked ahead

Things to do in Siem Reap with kids

Four temples is the maximum any child will accept and the heat here is worse than the temples — the middle of the day between March and May is genuinely dangerous for small children, and the park has almost no shade and no shops. The working plan is temples from opening until nine, something with water or animals in the afternoon, and the circus at night. One rule for the park: a tuk-tuk with a roof beats an air-conditioned car, because a child who can see out does not ask how long is left.

Phare, the Cambodian Circus · One show a night under a small big top; no animals, no language needed, and it sells out
APOPO — the mine rats · Twenty minutes, indoors, and children meet a trained rat; the best stop in town for an eight-year-old
Angkor Silk Farm · Silkworms, mulberry trees and a loom you can watch for ten minutes; free and shaded
West Baray · The one place near town to get in the water; local families, shaded mats, and a boat to the island
Street 60 Night Market · A Cambodian funfair: rides, grilled corn and no souvenirs at all. Evenings only
Ta Prohm · The one temple children actually want: trees growing through walls. Go at opening, seven thirty

Nightlife in Siem Reap

The whole of Siem Reap’s night happens in about six streets, and it divides sharply: Pub Street itself is two hundred loud metres of buckets and neon, Street 9 one block north is the same drinks at half the volume, and Sok San Road to the west is the newer hostel strip. Beyond them are the night markets, which stay open past eleven and are the only shopping the town does after dark. The province is poor and the money here matters, so bargain, but know what you are bargaining over.

Pub Street · Two hundred metres, pedestrian from five, and fifty-cent draught beer is a real price here
Street 9 · One block north; small bars, no touts, and the half of the night that locals use
Sok San Road · The newer hostel and bar strip west of the market; younger and cheaper than Pub Street
Angkor Night Market · The first one here, opened 2007; open past eleven and the back rows are the good ones
Art Center Night Market · On the river island; quieter, better stock, and you cross a footbridge to it
Heritage Walk at night · The riverside between the two markets; lit, quiet, and the way to walk off dinner

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Frequently asked questions about Siem Reap

What is there to see in Siem Reap?

The top sights in Siem Reap are Angkor Wat, Angkor Wat west causeway and The Bayon. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Siem Reap?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Siem Reap without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Siem Reap?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Siem Reap, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Angkor Wat and the hill.

How do you get to Siem Reap and get around?

The main ways are Siem Reap–Angkor International Airport, The old airport and Siem Reap Bus Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Siem Reap, and for how much?

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