Your guide meets you at Techo International, which took over as the capital’s airport in 2025 and sits some way south of the city — allow the best part of an hour for the drive in. The rest of the day is yours. If you land early, the riverfront promenade where the Tonlé Sap meets the Mekong is a short walk from most of the hotels we use, and the light there at six is worth the walk.

The Silver Pagoda and the Royal Palace first, then the National Museum, whose sandstone collection is the best preparation for Angkor you can get. The afternoon is given to Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek. This is a difficult few hours and we do not dress it up: our guides explain what was done here between 1975 and 1979, answer questions plainly, and leave you time to sit. Dinner together afterwards.

Five to six hours up National Road 5 through rice country, with a stop for lunch at a roadside kitchen along the way. Battambang was French provincial administration and Thai rule before that, and the shophouse blocks by the Sangker river still show it. We check in and walk the old quarter in the late afternoon, ending at the covered market when the vendors are packing down.

Out to Phnom Banan, a five-tower hilltop temple from the eleventh century that most visitors skip, then Phnom Sampeau, where a memorial marks the killing caves and the bat colony pours out of the cliff at dusk in a stream that lasts half an hour. In between, a visit to the circus and arts school that trains children from the surrounding villages. Evening free in town.

Three hours east on National Road 6 to Siem Reap. After lunch and check-in we make a short first visit to the park — usually Pre Rup or Phnom Bakheng, both built to be climbed and both good places to work out the geography before the serious days begin. Your three-day Angkor Pass is issued this afternoon and is valid across any ten days.

A pre-dawn start for Angkor Wat, built by Suryavarman II in the twelfth century and still the largest religious structure ever raised. We walk the bas-relief galleries before the heat. Angkor Thom follows — the Bayon with its fifty-odd towers of faces, the Terrace of the Elephants — and then Ta Prohm, left half-cleared so the silk-cotton roots still hold the stones apart. Back for a late lunch and a rest.

North to Banteay Srei, the small pink sandstone temple of 967 whose carving is the finest in the country and, unusually, was built by a priest rather than a king. On the way back we stop at the Roluos group, ninth-century and the oldest work in the park. Late afternoon on the Tonlé Sap at Kampong Phluk, a stilt village standing eight metres above the dry-season waterline.

A morning flight from Siem Reap–Angkor International to Techo, under an hour in the air, then the expressway and the coast road south-west to Kampot — around three hours with a stop. The town is small, low and set on a tidal river with the Bokor massif behind it. Check in, then a boat out on the river for the last of the light and dinner on the bank.

Morning on a pepper farm on the Kampot plain, where the vines are trained on poles and the crop carries a protected designation of origin. Then across to Kep, a French seaside resort in the 1960s and largely ruined since, for crab pulled from baskets at the market and cooked with green pepper on the stem. Back through the salt flats. Farewell dinner in Kampot.

Back to Phnom Penh in the morning, around three hours, with a transfer to Techo International for onward flights. If your flight is late we can leave bags at a hotel and use the last hours on the Central Market or the Russian Market. Extensions to Koh Rong or across to Ho Chi Minh City by road are straightforward to arrange.