Highlights of Cambodia

Small Group Journeys

Highlights

Tour Details

Itinerary

Day 1: Welcome to Phnom Penh

You are collected at Techo International Airport and driven in to the hotel. Drinks that evening introduce the group, and your Tour Leader sets out how the days ahead are arranged.

Day 2: Explore Phnom Penh

The capital is best taken in from a cyclo, at the level of its traffic and its pavements. The morning opens at Wat Phnom, the hill the city grew up around, and goes on to the Royal Palace, residence of King Norodom Sihamoni, with the Silver Pagoda beside it. At the National Museum you get a broad view of Khmer sculpture. The afternoon is given to Tuol Sleng, a school building that the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison and interrogation centre; it is kept as a record of what was done there, and the visit is a quiet one. The day closes in the trading halls — the Russian Market and the Central Market — where stalls sell silk, handicrafts, jewellery and discs.

Day 3: Phnom Penh to Siem Reap

After breakfast you fly north from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. The airport sits about 50 km from town, so allow an hour on the road. The route then leads to Kampong Phluk, three settlements whose houses are raised on tall wooden stilts. Water surrounds them for about half the year: the flood arrives in August or September and holds until February, and rowing visitors between the houses is one way families earn a living in that season. A small boat takes you in among the flooded mangroves, a habitat that spends half its life submerged and holds a good deal of birdlife. Boat and vehicle bring you back, with nothing scheduled until the evening. Phare, the Cambodian Circus, has the night, and there theatre, live music, dance and circus skills are put together to tell Khmer stories drawn from history, from village life and from the country as it is now. The performers are young and they give it everything.

Day 4: Siem Reap

Set an alarm tonight: the day begins before dawn so that you are in place when the sun appears behind Angkor Wat. Breakfast comes afterwards at a restaurant nearby, after which you go in by the southern entrance into Angkor Thom, the walled 'Great City'. Most of what stands within it dates from the reign of King Jayavarman VII, between 1181 and 1220. Faces of Avalokiteshvara look out from the gate towers, 23m (75-foot) up, and few carvings anywhere work on people the way these do. At the centre of the walled city is the state temple, Bayon; that is the next stop. Finished late in the 1100s, it bears hundreds of large stone faces. The walk also takes in the Elephant Terrace and the Leper King Terrace, then Baphuon and Phimeanakas, the two best-known 11th-century monuments left standing. Next comes Ta Prohm, the one people remember, for the great trees whose roots have worked deep into the walls; it also served as a location in the Tomb Raider film. The trees were left in place on purpose. When the forest was cleared away from the ruins, those working here chose to keep the temple looking much as it looked to the first visitors who found their way to it and to its neighbours. Trunks now grow around the masonry and straight through it, rising well clear of the walls. The evening is spent in the one theatre here that is air-conditioned, where dancers, musicians and singers carry older Khmer forms into a well-staged room, and the kitchen there is among the better ones in town.