Siem Reap receives the majority of Cambodia's international tourism because Angkor Wat is there: a concentration of religious architecture across 400 square kilometres that is, even accounting for the crowds, one of the most striking things humans have built. The difficulty with this concentration is that it creates a visit to Cambodia that is a visit to one city and one archaeological complex, leaving out a country whose geography ranges from the Cardamom Mountains on the Thai border to the Mekong riverine islands in the south, most of it largely empty of the tourism infrastructure that makes visiting convenient.
The Angkor Complex Beyond the Main Circuit
The Angkor Archaeological Park contains over a thousand temples and structures, the majority of them unrestored and accessible only on foot or by dirt track. The tourist circuit (Angkor Wat, Bayon, Ta Prohm, Banteay Srei) represents perhaps a dozen of those thousand.
Preah Khan is a temple the scale of Ta Prohm but receiving perhaps a tenth of its visitors: a monastic complex of 1,000 teachers and 97,840 attendants at its height, according to the inscription on its north gate, now partially collapsed into a state that requires walking through fallen galleries rather than viewing them from platforms. The strangest structure in the complex is Hall of Dancers, its walls decorated with a repetitive frieze of apsaras (celestial dancers) in a carving style distinct from Angkor Wat's, looser, more three-dimensional.
Beng Mealea, 70 kilometres east of Siem Reap on a road that was unpaved until 2010, is the temple the jungle reclaimed and nobody came back to restore: a 12th-century Angkor-period complex the size of Angkor Wat left entirely to the strangler figs, the tree roots growing through the collapsed stone galleries creating the specific Angkor romanticism that Ta Prohm now curates artificially. Beng Mealea at 7am, with four other visitors and a guide, is the Angkor experience that most people are looking for. The drive through rice fields and forest is itself worth the hour.
Koh Ker, 127 kilometres northeast of Siem Reap, was the Khmer capital for twenty years in the 10th century, before Angkor Thom was established. The site covers 81 square kilometres and contains 180 structures, the dominant being Prasat Thom: a 35-metre pyramidal temple rising from the jungle floor in seven tiers, the summit providing a view across the forest canopy that nothing at Angkor, surrounded by tourist infrastructure, can reproduce. The road is paved now; the drive is two hours. The site has an entrance fee and a small parking area. It is not crowded.
Battambang: The Provincial City That Works
Battambang is Cambodia's second city, nine hours by slow boat from Siem Reap along the Sangker River (or three hours by road), a French colonial provincial capital with a functioning artistic community, a bamboo train, and the best surviving example of French Indochina urban planning outside Hoi An.
The old town's colonial architecture (the Governor's Residence (1905), the Psar Nat market building (1936), the shophouses along the Sangker riverside) is in better condition than anything comparable in Phnom Penh, where development pressure has been more intense. The buildings are not museums; they are a pharmacy, a rice dealer, a Chinese merchant family's residence still occupied. The town functions around them without particular awareness of their aesthetic quality.
The Bamboo Train (norry) between Battambang and O Dambong, revived in tourist form after the railway line was decommissioned, is a bamboo platform on railway wheels powered by a lawnmower engine that runs at 40 kilometres per hour on a single track with no sidings, meaning that when two trains meet (which happens regularly) one must be disassembled and put beside the track to allow the other to pass. The process takes ninety seconds and everyone involved treats it as routine. The countryside through which the train passes (rice paddies, sugar palm trees, ox carts) is the Cambodian interior that Siem Reap doesn't show.
The Phare Cambodian Circus, based partly in Battambang (the school) and partly in Siem Reap (the performance), trains young Cambodians from disadvantaged backgrounds in circus arts and performance (acrobatics, clowning, narrative dance) and produces shows that are not themed for tourist consumption but that address Cambodian history, including the Khmer Rouge period. The performances in Battambang are less polished than the Siem Reap nightly shows, but they're conducted on the school grounds with the students still in training, which is something different.
The Cardamom Mountains: Cambodia's Empty Interior
The Cardamom Mountains in southwestern Cambodia contain one of the largest intact lowland rainforest areas in Southeast Asia, a forest that survived the Khmer Rouge period and subsequent logging pressure primarily because of its inaccessibility. The main protected area, the Southern Cardamom National Park (established 2016), covers 1.44 million hectares and is home to elephant, gaur, banteng, pileated gibbon, and the Siamese crocodile (one of the world's rarest reptiles, with its largest known wild population in the Cardamom river systems).
The base town for the Cardamoms is Chi Phat, a former poaching community that converted to community-based ecotourism in 2007 under a WWF programme: the residents now operate the lodges, guide the trekking routes, and run the river transport, with income distributed across the community rather than concentrated in an outside operator. The trekking routes run from two-day circuits to seven-day deep-forest expeditions; the wildlife sightings are not guaranteed but the forest itself (the morning bird chorus, the river systems fed by mountain streams, the specific quality of primary rainforest that hasn't been logged in living memory) is the experience.
Getting to Chi Phat requires Phnom Penh (3 hours to Koh Kong by bus), then a speedboat or longtail from Koh Kong to Chi Phat on the Preak Piphot River, a trip of two to three hours depending on water level. The difficulty of access is the reason the forest still exists.
The Mekong Islands: Koh Trong and the River Communities
The Mekong River as it passes through Cambodia's Kratie and Stung Treng provinces contains one of the world's rarest freshwater mammals: the Irrawaddy dolphin, a small, round-headed freshwater species reduced to perhaps 85 individuals in this stretch of the river, one of several populations clinging to survival in the lower Mekong. Kratie town, on the eastern bank of the Mekong, is the base for dolphin-watching boat trips to the Kampi pool, 15 kilometres north, where a pod of fifteen to twenty individuals maintains a territory around a year-round deep pool.
Koh Trong, a 7-kilometre island in the Mekong opposite Kratie town (ferry crossing: five minutes, fifty cents), is a Cambodian farming island in the river: pomelo orchards, mulberry plantations, wooden stilted houses along the bank, a small community of Cham Muslims in the island's centre. Bicycles are available at the ferry landing. The island loop takes two hours and passes through a version of Cambodian rural life that is not visible from any road in the country that international tourists regularly travel.
The Mekong Discovery Trail, a cycling and boating route developed by the Cambodian government through Kratie and Stung Treng provinces, covers these communities and the dolphin pools in a structured way for independent travellers. The infrastructure is basic (guesthouses, not hotels; Khmer food at roadside restaurants, not tourist menus), which is the correct infrastructure for the landscape it serves.
