angkor archaeological park

One consideration you need to make when planning a visit to the Angkor Archaeological Park in Siem Reap, Cambodia, is how you will get around the area during your visit. With around 400 square kilometres with many points of interests to visit, you need to plan out your transportation option ahead of time to make the best use of your time there.

Since there is no lodging option available within the Park, most visitors stay in one of the lodging options in the city of Siem Reap (about six kilometres south of Angkor Wat). You can find transportation options quite easily in the city. Travelers typically visit the temples either by buses for large tour groups, or by vans, cars, tuk-tuks, motorcycles, or bicycles for independent travelers. What you need to consider is the distance of your travel/route, the cost, the time you have, and the weather conditions. If you’re going to one of the remote temples, you may want to make sure that you have a way to get back or go to your next destination (i.e., it may not be easy to get public transportation from there). Also, depending on the time of the day or the season of the year when you’re traveling, it might be very hot during the middle of the day or it might be raining. And negotiating transportation for the whole day may be cheaper than getting transportation from point to point.

For our visit to Siem Reap, we had a tour company arrange our transportation, so we had a driver with air-conditioned van and a tour guide ready for our day trips there. Even then, we had to make plan adjustment on the first day. Initially, we were thinking of ‘going healthy’ and spend our first afternoon touring the area in bicycles. Sounded like a good idea, until we found out the reality that afternoon that a) we were pretty tired after our trip from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap in the morning, and b) it was hot and humid outside. Our tour guide suggested that we went by air-conditioned van instead, though if we still insisted to go by bicycle, he was ready for that too. We followed his advice, and that turned out to be the right thing to do. We were able to spend more time at Angkor Wat and Phnom Bakheng that afternoon, and reserved our energy for a longer day trip the following day. Our driver also had a cooler full of cold bottled water, which was very nice to have especially as we walked around the temple area in the heat of the day.

The photo below was taken from our van on our second day as we’re about to enter Angkor Thom. You can see some modes of transportation that others took: by tuk-tuk, on foot, by bicycle, and — in some areas — on an elephant.

The Angkor Archaeological Park is an area stretching over 400 square kilometres near Siem Reap, Cambodia, that contains many remains of what was the capital area of the Khmer Empire during the 9th to 15th century. It included one of the largest pre-industrial city in the world (the ancient city at its height was more than ten times the size of modern-day Manhattan borough of New York City). Today visitors come to the area especially to visit one of the finest ancient monuments in the world, Angkor Wat.

To visit the Angkor Archaeological Park area, if you’re not a local Cambodian, you would need to get a visitor pass that is valid for either one day, three days, or the whole week (we got the three-day pass, which cost USD$40 per person). You need to stop at the front gate, pay the fee, and get your photograph taken to get the pass. You will then need to carry the pass with you at all times. At the entrance of the temples, typically there is someone checking for the pass before you can enter. The pass has your photo on it, so you would have to carry your own to enter the temples.

Angkor Wat is the most popular temple in the Park, but there are others that are equally unique and worth visiting. There is Phnom Bakheng, a temple on top of a hill that provides a nice vantage point of the surrounding area especially around sunset time. You can also visit the ancient city of Angkor Thom with its temples inside. Or you can go to Ta Prohm, a temple ruin consumed by the forest trees that was made famous by the movie Tomb Raider.

The French did a lot to preserve the Angkor temples when they colonized Cambodia. Today two of the main routes for visiting the Angkor Archaeological Park, known as the Little Circuit and the Big Circuit, were routes that were established by the French to visit these temples.

The photo below was taken near the entrance gate while I was waiting to get my entrance pass processed. It’s an illustrated map of the Angkor region, showing the landmarks around that one can explore while visiting the Park.