Cambodia
Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
The largest religious monument ever built, at the heart of a lost capital you can spend three days getting lost in.
Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on earth, the centrepiece of a temple city that ruled mainland Southeast Asia for six centuries. The wider Angkor Archaeological Park scatters sandstone towers, moats and root-cracked ruins across forest north of Siem Reap, the small riverside town that feeds and beds every visitor. Most come for sunrise over the five towers and stay for the Bayon's stone faces and the quieter temples beyond.
Suggested stay
3–5 days
Language
Khmer
Currency
KHR
Timezone
UTC+7
Why you'll love Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
The scale Hundreds of temples spread across a park the size of a city, and even a three-day pass leaves plenty unseen.
The Bayon More than 200 serene stone faces stare out of the towers at the centre of the walled city of Angkor Thom.
Jungle and stone Silk-cotton roots prise the galleries apart at the tree-swallowed temples, the image most people carry home.
Siem Reap A compact, walkable town with genuinely good eating, riverside cafes and tuk-tuks waiting on every corner.
Best time to visit
Nov-Feb
Cool & dry · 31-34° days
13.362° N, 103.859° E
UTC+7 · Asia/Phnom Penh
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Weather & when to go to Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best Nov-Feb
Conditions Jan Cool & dry · Feb Dry season · Mar Hot & dusty · Apr Extreme heat · May Monsoon starts · Jun-Jul Monsoon · Aug Heavy rain · Sep Monsoon peak · Oct Rains easing · Nov Cool & green · Dec Cool & dry
Watch for Mar-Apr extreme heat risk · Sep monsoon flooding risk
Cards tinted by verified verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
April and May are punishing on unshaded stone, and June to October brings heavy afternoon rain and mosquitoes. The trade-off is real: wet-season Angkor has full moats, green forest and reflections in the barays, with far fewer people at sunrise. Cool-season mornings can be genuinely cold on a tuk-tuk before dawn.
Top things to do in Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
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Angkor Wat - sunrise over the five towers
history scenic 👍 PopularThe temple faces west, so dawn puts the towers in silhouette above the north reflecting pool and the crowd that comes for it. Inside, the outer gallery carries hundreds of metres of bas-relief - the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, Suryavarman's army on the march - and the steep Bakan level opens on a timed queue.
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Angkor Thom and the Bayon - faces at the centre of the walled city
history 👍 PopularEnter over the causeway of gods and demons at the south gate, then work through the Bayon's forest of towers, where outsized stone faces watch from every angle. The same enclosure holds the Baphuon, the Terrace of the Elephants and the Terrace of the Leper King.
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Ta Prohm - the temple the forest kept
history nature wildlife 👍 PopularLeft deliberately half-cleared, so silk-cotton and strangler fig roots still pour over the galleries and doorways. It is the most photographed ruin at Angkor after the main temple, and the most crowded for it - come at opening or in the last hour of the day.
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Banteay Srei - the pink sandstone carving
history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommendedA small tenth-century temple north of the main park, cut from rose-coloured sandstone in relief so fine and so deep it looks like woodwork rather than masonry. Worth the drive out, and worth going early before the buses arrive from town.
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Preah Khan - a monastic city in the trees
history off beaten path ⭐ Highly recommendedJayavarman VII's rambling temple-monastery: a long processional axis of collapsing halls, lichen and doorways narrowing to nothing. Far quieter than the headline temples, and the best place to feel the scale of what Angkor actually was.
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Phnom Bakheng - the hilltop sunset temple
history scenicThe oldest of the great Angkor temples, on a low hill with a distant view of Angkor Wat's towers over the forest. Sunset numbers on top are capped and people queue well beforehand, so arrive early or take sunset from the Pre Rup terraces instead.
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Angkor National Museum - context before the temples
culture arts historyAir-conditioned galleries in town covering Khmer sculpture, the Hindu and Buddhist iconography you will be staring at all week, and a hall of a thousand buddhas. An hour here makes the next three days legible.
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Phare, The Cambodian Circus - acrobatics under a big top
culture arts nightlife musicA nightly show of acrobatics, live music and theatre performed by graduates of an arts school founded for disadvantaged young Cambodians. Genuinely good rather than dutiful, and the takings fund the school.
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Artisans Angkor - stone and silk workshops
culture arts shoppingA working training centre in town where apprentices carve sandstone, lacquer and cut silk in front of you, with a silk farm on the edge of town. The clearest window anywhere on how the temple carving was actually done.
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Old Market and Pub Street - Siem Reap after dark
food nightlife musicThe grid behind the Old Market runs from fish amok and grilled river fish to neon and loud bars in about fifty metres. Eat at the market end and wander the riverside night markets rather than settling on the main strip.
Best areas to stay in Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Old French Quarter and Pub Street
First-time visitors $$Bar-lined lanes behind the Old Market
Explore hotels in Old French Quarter and Pub Street →
Wat Bo
Quiet base $$Quiet east-bank lanes, guesthouses and villas
Explore hotels in Wat Bo →
Kandal Village
Cafes and boutiques $$Small design, cafe and boutique strip
Explore hotels in Kandal Village →
Charles de Gaulle Road
Resorts near the park $$$Resort strip on the road to the temples
Explore hotels in Charles de Gaulle Road →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
Getting to & around Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
Getting there
Fly into Siem Reap-Angkor International Airport, then about an hour by road into town.
Flight
Siem Reap-Angkor International Airport (SAI)
Roughly 40 km east of town in Sotr Nikum district. Hotel cars, taxis and shared vans take about 45 minutes to an hour. The old airport beside the temples closed when this one opened in 2023, so allow far more transfer time than older guides assume.
Coach
Siem Reap bus station
Frequent services from Phnom Penh in around six hours, plus Battambang, Sihanoukville and the Poipet border crossing from Thailand.
Drive
National Road 6 runs east to Phnom Penh and west to Poipet; private cars with drivers are the common alternative to the bus.
Ferry
Phnom Krom port
A slow boat crosses Tonle Sap from Battambang or Phnom Penh. Scenic and memorable, but it only runs when the lake is high.
Getting around
Tuk-tuk
The default. Hire one by the day for a temple circuit, or hail app-based ones around town.
TBC
Car with driver
Worth it for the far temples - Banteay Srei, Beng Mealea, Koh Ker - and for any wet-season day.
TBC
Bicycle
Flat roads and shady temple lanes suit the small circuit; long and hot beyond it.
TBC
Walk
Central Siem Reap is small - the Old Market to Wat Bo is a short stroll.
Free
Day trips from Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
Banteay Srei and Kbal Spean
Half dayCarving and river lingas
Pair the finest carving at Angkor with Kbal Spean, where a jungle stream runs over a riverbed of carved lingas and reclining Vishnus. The Kbal Spean walk is a stiff 45 minutes uphill, and the water over the carvings thins to almost nothing late in the dry season.
Getting there
car | tour
About 45 min each way by car or tuk-tuk, roughly 35 km north
Beng Mealea and Koh Ker
Full dayCollapsed jungle temples
Beng Mealea is a contemporary of Angkor Wat left roughly as it fell, a chaos of toppled blocks crossed on boardwalks. Koh Ker adds a seven-tiered pyramid from the decade the capital moved there. A long day mostly spent in the car, and both are close to empty.
Getting there
car | tour
About 1.5 hr east by car to Beng Mealea, another hour on to Koh Ker
Tonle Sap floating villages
Half dayStilt-house lake villages
Villages on stilts or floating outright on a lake that swells and shrinks with the Mekong every year. Kampong Khleang is further out and far less touristed than the closer options. Go when the water is high; late in the dry season the boats work from shrunken channels.
Getting there
car | ferry | tour
30-60 min by road to Kampong Phluk or Kampong Khleang, then by boat
Phnom Kulen
Full daySacred hill and waterfall
The hill where the empire was declared in 802, with a waterfall you can swim under, a reclining Buddha carved into the summit boulder and more riverbed lingas. Busy at weekends with Cambodian families, and the falls are thunderous in the wet and modest at the end of the dry.
Getting there
car | tour
About 1.5 hr north by car, on an access road that runs one way at a time
Battambang
1-2 daysColonial river town
Cambodia's most intact French shophouse town, with the bamboo train, hillside temples and the bat cave exodus at dusk. The boat from Siem Reap is one of the great slow journeys in the country when the water is high, and simply does not run when it is not.
Getting there
bus | car | ferry
About 3 hr by road, or a long seasonal boat across the lake and up the Sangker river
A little history of Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire, which at its height reached from the Mekong delta into what is now Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. Its kings built in stone for the gods and in wood for themselves, which is why hundreds of temples survive and not one palace does. The city ran on water: a lattice of canals, moats and vast reservoirs called barays that fed the rice fields and, on the standard reading, supported a population in the hundreds of thousands.
Angkor Wat itself went up in the early twelfth century under Suryavarman II as a Hindu temple to Vishnu, and passed into Buddhist use later. Jayavarman VII, rebuilding after a Cham sack in 1177, added Angkor Thom, the Bayon, Ta Prohm and Preah Khan in one extraordinary spree. The court drifted south towards Phnom Penh in the fifteenth century, but Angkor Wat was never truly abandoned: monks kept it in use, and Cambodians never lost sight of it, whatever nineteenth-century French accounts of discovery claimed.
Jayavarman II is declared universal monarch on Phnom Kulen, the conventional founding of the Khmer Empire.
Yasovarman I moves the capital onto the Angkor plain, centred on the temple-mountain of Phnom Bakheng.
Banteay Srei is consecrated - the finest carving at Angkor, and not a royal foundation.
Suryavarman II builds Angkor Wat as a temple to Vishnu and his own funerary monument.
Cham forces sack Angkor, ending a long stretch of Khmer dominance.
Jayavarman VII rebuilds as a Buddhist king: Angkor Thom, the Bayon, Ta Prohm and Preah Khan.
Ayutthayan armies take Angkor; the court shifts south and the capital eventually settles near Phnom Penh.
Henri Mouhot's published journals make Angkor famous in Europe, though it was never lost to Cambodians.
UNESCO lists Angkor as World Heritage, at first as a site in danger after decades of war and looting.
Know before you go
Payment
Cash preferred
English
Widely spoken
Wifi
Workable
Power
Type A / B / C / F / G
230 V, 50 Hz
Dialing
+855
Extreme heat risk in this window; check current conditions before you go.
Monsoon flooding risk in this window; check current conditions before you go.
The months our climate read flags to avoid: the wettest, lowest-rated weather of the year.
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FAQs about Angkor Wat (Siem Reap)
▸ How many days do you need for Angkor?
Three is the standard answer and it holds up: one day for Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Ta Prohm, one for the far temples like Banteay Srei and Preah Khan, and one to slow down. Two works if you start at sunrise. One day is a forced march.
▸ When is the best time to visit Angkor Wat?
November to February is the cool dry season and the easiest time to walk temples all day. March warms quickly, April and May are the hottest months of the year, and June to October is the rainy season - green, reflective and much less crowded, but genuinely wet.
▸ Is the Angkor Wat sunrise worth doing?
Once, yes: the silhouette over the north reflecting pool is the image of the place. Expect a crowd several hundred deep, and go on your first morning while the jet lag is still helping. On other days, sunrise at Srah Srang or Pre Rup is nearly empty.
▸ How does the Angkor Pass work?
Passes come in one, three and seven day versions, sold through the official ticket centre on the road out to the park or its website, with your photo printed on the ticket. The multi-day passes are non-consecutive, so you can spread them over a longer window. Carry it: it is checked at every temple.
▸ What should you wear at the temples?
Shoulders and knees covered. It is enforced at Angkor Wat's upper Bakan level, where a vest or short shorts will get you turned away, and it is simple good manners everywhere else. Light long sleeves, a hat and real shoes beat sandals on the steep stairs.
▸ Do you need a guide?
Not to get in, but a licensed Khmer guide changes what you actually see - the bas-reliefs in particular are a story you cannot read unaided. A common compromise is a guide for the first day and a tuk-tuk driver alone after that.
▸ Is Siem Reap worth time beyond the temples?
Yes, if only to recover. For its size the town has a serious cafe and restaurant scene, a circus, silk and stone workshops, and the lake villages on its doorstep. Most people underestimate it and leave the day their pass expires.
More in Cambodia
Battambang
Angkorian hill temples, a bat-filled cave and a circus school, all a tuk-tuk ride through rice fields from a sleepy colonial grid.
✓ best Nov-JanPhnom Penh
A riverfront capital that asks something of you: a gold-roofed palace, a brutal recent history and the country's best eating, all within a few blocks.
✓ best Dec-Feb