Itinerary · for one

Cambodia · temples, river, coast

A solo loop through Khmer Cambodia in the cool dry season · nine nights · Angkor”s sandstone, the Mekong”s slow brown push, the Gulf of Thailand at the end. Three nights at Siem Reap for sunrise behind Angkor Wat”s reflecting pool, Bayon”s stone faces at Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm”s strangler figs and the pink sandstone of Banteay Srei an hour out. One night in Battambang for the bamboo train along the rural tracks, Phare Ponleu Selpak”s art school, and the dusk bat exodus from Phnom Sampeau. Two nights in Phnom Penh for the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, the National Museum”s Angkor sculpture, the heavy hours at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, and a Mekong sunset from Sisowath Quay. Two nights at Kampot for the pepper plantations, the abandoned French hill station on Bokor, and a river cruise with fireflies on the banks. One last night in Kep — crab market lunch, the 8km loop in the national park, and the modernist villas crumbling slowly back into the jungle before the flight home.

1 traveler 5 bases 9 nights 11 min read

v1 · May 12, 2026

Dec 5 · Day 1 · the first one

Wheels down at Siem Reap. Then the stone faces wait.

Out of Hong Kong on a Sunday, Siem Reap by Sunday night. Nine nights ahead in the cool dry season — sandstone warm under bare hands at dawn, dust raised from a tuk-tuk on a red-earth road, the Mekong going amber at six. Three nights at the temples for Angkor''s sunrise and Bayon''s 216 faces and Ta Prohm''s strangler figs. One night in Battambang for the bamboo train and a bat-cave dusk. Two in Phnom Penh for the Royal Palace, the National Museum''s Angkor bronzes, and the heavier hours at Tuol Sleng. Then south to pepper country — two nights in Kampot for Bokor''s abandoned hill station and a sunset river cruise, one last night in Kep for crab market lunch and the slow fade of colonial seafront.

Begin the journey ↓

Dec 5 → Dec 14 · 9 nights · 5 bases · 480 km between bases

Chapter 01 · Dec 5–7 Days 1–3

Siem Reap · the temples

Three nights at the gate of the empire. Sandstone warm under the palm at five, the reflecting pool going pink behind Angkor Wat's five towers, and 216 stone faces half-smiling at Bayon by noon.

3 nights

Fly Hong Kong (HKG) → Siem Reap (SAI) · ~3 hr direct or via BKK

Visa e-Visa online before departure (USD 36) or VOA at SAI · keep one passport photo handy

Pass Angkor 3-day at the official ticket centre off NR60 · not at the temple gates

Things to do

Angkor Wat sunrise · face east behind the north reflecting pool · arrive by 5am to claim the line
Bayon at Angkor Thom · 216 stone faces · best in late morning when the light hits all four sides
Ta Prohm · the Tomb Raider tree-roots swallowing the galleries · go early or late, never midday
Banteay Srei · 1hr out by tuk-tuk · pink sandstone carvings, the finest in the empire
Beng Mealea · jungle ruin 2hr east · half-collapsed, half-swallowed, almost no crowds

Modest dress at all temples · shoulders and knees covered, sarongs sold at every gate · the heat off the stone at noon is real, carry 2L and a hat · tuk-tuk circuit driver USD 20/day, private car with AC USD 50/day

Bookings

flight HKG → SAI · one-way pending

hotel Siem Reap · 3 nights · pool, walking distance to Pub Street pending

activity Angkor 3-day pass at official ticket centre pending

Photo taken on the spot; pass is non-transferable

Chapter 01 · the story

Angkor Wat at 5:30am is dark, mosquito-loud, and already three hundred people deep at the north reflecting pool. The five towers come out of the sky before the sun does — a black silhouette on a pink wash — and everyone agrees not to speak.

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The tuk-tuk fare from the old quarter to the moat is 20,000 riel before five, USD 6 if the driver wants dollars, and the small-circuit versus grand-circuit choice gets made on the back seat in the dark. Small is Angkor Wat, Bayon, Ta Prohm — the canonical loop, three temples, doable by noon. Grand adds Preah Khan, Neak Pean, Ta Som, a slower arc that finishes after the heat has come down. The driver waits while you take the pre-dawn picture and does not ask which one you want until the sun is up.

By eight the stone is already warm under the palm. The galleries at Angkor Wat run for hundreds of metres of bas-relief — the Churning of the Sea of Milk on the east wall, the army of Suryavarman II on the south — and the trick is to walk them in the order the carvings were meant to be read, anticlockwise from the south, which almost no tour group does. The crowds break against you in the other direction and the panels open up.

Bayon at eleven is the second temple of the day and the better one. The 216 stone faces — half-smiling, four to a tower, fifty-four towers in the original count — look down on every angle of the courtyard at once. There is no good place to stand that one of them is not watching. Then Ta Prohm in the late afternoon, where the strangler figs have grown through the galleries and the conservators have agreed to leave them, because pulling the roots would bring the walls with them. The roots are the building now.

Out at Banteay Srei the next morning, an hour by tuk-tuk past the rice fields and the small village markets selling palm sugar in banana-leaf cones, the pink sandstone holds a finer carving than anything closer in. The whole pilgrimage is paced like this: early, slow, hot by ten, back in the pool by one, out again at four.

Chapter 02 · Dec 8 Day 4

Battambang · the bamboo train

A single night in the old French rice-trading town. Bamboo platform on iron wheels skimming the rural tracks at 30 km/h, and at dusk the bat cave on Phnom Sampeau pours out a black river into the sky.

1 night

Drive Siem Reap → Battambang · ~3 hr private car · USD 60–80 one-way

Onward Battambang → Phnom Penh next morning · Giant Ibis VIP bus ~6 hr

Things to do

Norry bamboo train · O Sra Lav line · the rural tracks, a single bamboo platform, USD 5
Phnom Sampeau · the killing caves and the dusk bat exodus from 5:45pm · a black river into the sky
Phare Ponleu Selpak · the art school the Phare circus came from · classes open to visitors
Wat Banan · five-tower hilltop temple, 358 steps up, the small-scale Angkor Wat
French colonial old town · shuttered shophouses along the Sangker River, coffee at a tile-floored corner café

Battambang is dusty in dry season · long sleeves on the bamboo train help with the wind and grit · the bat cave road is unlit after sundown, arrange the tuk-tuk to wait

Bookings

hotel Battambang · 1 night · riverside boutique in the old town pending

rental Private car Siem Reap → Battambang pending

NR6 then NR5 · ~290 km · book through SR hotel

activity Bamboo train + Phnom Sampeau combo · half-day tuk-tuk pending

Chapter 02 · the story

The norry is a bamboo platform the size of a double bed bolted to two free axles on a single-track French colonial rail line. It runs at 30 km/h on rails the government never relaid. When two norries meet, the one with fewer passengers lifts off the track.

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The Sangker River runs grey-green through Battambang and the shophouses on its banks are still the ones the French rice traders built in the 1900s — tile floors, shuttered windows, the kind of two-storey arcades you find in Hoi An and Phnom Penh and nowhere else in this region. The town moves at a quarter of Siem Reap’s pace. The tuk-tuks idle. The coffee comes in a glass with condensed milk at the bottom and a saucer balanced on top to keep the flies out.

The bamboo train — the norry — is the thing everyone comes for, and it earns the visit. The platform is bolted, not welded, to the axles. A small petrol engine drives a rubber belt against the rear wheels. You sit cross-legged on a thin mat and the dry-season air comes at you full of grit and the line skims the rice paddies and the kids along the bank wave at the foreigners and the driver throttles up to 30 km/h on track that has not been maintained since 1955. When a second norry comes the other way the rule is that the lighter load breaks down — the axles lift off, the platform is set aside, the other passes, and the whole thing reassembles in under ninety seconds.

Phnom Sampeau at dusk is the other half of the visit, and it carries the weight. The hill has caves the Khmer Rouge used to dump bodies into in 1977 — there is a glass case of skulls at the bottom of the shaft — and then at exactly 5:45 the bat colony in the cliff face pours out a single unbroken black ribbon into the sky, ten minutes without a gap. You stand on the road with the tuk-tuk drivers drinking warm Angkor beer and watch a black river go up against the red sky. Both things on the same hill, half an hour apart, and the town does not pretend they are not.

Chapter 03 · Dec 9–10 Days 5–6

Phnom Penh · the capital

Two nights where the Mekong meets the Tonlé Sap. Gold spires on the Royal Palace at noon, the Angkor bronzes cool in the National Museum at three, and a heavier afternoon at S-21 that the country asks you not to look away from.

2 nights

Bus Battambang → Phnom Penh · Giant Ibis VIP morning service · ~6 hr · USD 15

Tone Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are essential but heavy · do them on the same day, then walk the river

Things to do

Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda · 5,000 silver floor tiles, the Emerald Buddha · closed 11–2
National Museum · the finest Angkor sculpture under one roof · the Jayavarman VII head is the one
Tuol Sleng (S-21) · the school turned prison · audio guide on, two hours minimum
Choeung Ek killing fields · 15 km out by tuk-tuk · combine with S-21 in one afternoon
Sunset on Sisowath Quay · the Mekong going amber, then a Russian Market dinner of num banh chok

Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are emotionally heavy · skip the temptation to "fit them in around lunch" · tuk-tuks via PassApp or Grab, never agree without the meter app · the riverfront after dark is fine, the small streets behind less so

Bookings

hotel Phnom Penh · 2 nights · riverside or BKK1 district pending

train Giant Ibis VIP bus · Battambang → Phnom Penh pending

Book online 1 week ahead · reclining seats, USB, wifi

Chapter 03 · the story

S-21 held 18,000 people between 1975 and 1979. Twelve walked out alive. Choeung Ek, fifteen kilometres south, is where the trucks drove the rest. After heavy rain, bone fragments and scraps of cloth still surface in the path. The two places have to sit next to one another.

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Tuol Sleng was a high school before it was a prison. The classrooms on the ground floor of Building A still have the original tile floor and the iron bed frames the Khmer Rouge bolted down for interrogation — one bed per room, an ammunition box for a toilet, the photograph that the Vietnamese soldiers took on 7 January 1979 still hanging on the wall above the bed itself. The headphones for the audio guide play the voice of Chum Mey, one of the twelve survivors, who returned in his eighties to sit at a table in the courtyard most mornings, signing the book he wrote about it. The audio runs two and a half hours. You take all of them.

Choeung Ek is fifteen kilometres south down a narrow road through new suburbs and small textile factories. The site itself is the orchard behind a Chinese cemetery the Khmer Rouge requisitioned in 1976. The mass graves are open pits in the ground, fenced off, with a wooden walkway and a memorial stupa at the centre stacked seventeen storeys high with skulls. The audio asks you to look at the path. After heavy rain — and the rains come hard in this country — bone fragments and scraps of cloth work their way up out of the soil. The staff collect them in glass cases by the path. They are still doing this in 2026.

You do both on the same afternoon, the way the country asks, and then walk the Sisowath Quay at sunset with the Mekong going amber and the Tonlé Sap flowing into it from the right at the confluence the Khmer call Chaktomuk, the four faces. The Royal Palace spires are gold against the dusk. The country is asking the same question Kigali asks — how do you keep going — and the answer is the same kind of answer, the river, the palace, the evening, the work of holding both.

Chapter 04 · Dec 11–12 Days 7–8

Kampot · pepper country

Two slow nights in the riverside town the French called Kampôt. Green pepper picked still on the vine, the abandoned art-deco casino on Bokor swallowed in cloud, a sunset cruise with fireflies blinking the mangrove banks.

2 nights

Drive Phnom Penh → Kampot · ~3 hr private car along NR3 · USD 60

Pepper Kampot pepper is PGI-protected · La Plantation and Sothy's both do walk-in tours with tastings

Things to do

Bokor Mountain · the abandoned 1920s French hill station · casino, church, mist, no entry fee
La Plantation pepper farm · green, red, black, white · the tasting flight at the end
Kampot River sunset cruise · 5pm, two hours, fireflies after dark on the mangroves
Salt fields east of town · the harvesting season runs Dec–May, workers raking pyramids of white
Durian roundabout and the riverfront promenade · sundowner at a French-shuttered café, fish amok for dinner

Bokor at the top is 1,000 m and 10°C cooler · a layer worth packing · the road up is fully sealed but fog can be total above 800 m · the pepper farms are 30–40 min from town, combine two in one half-day

Bookings

hotel Kampot · 2 nights · riverside bungalow or boutique in town pending

rental Private car Phnom Penh → Kampot pending

activity Sunset river cruise · 2 hr · firefly extension pending

Chapter 04 · the story

Kampot pepper is one of three peppers in the world with PGI status. The vines are trained up wooden poles in red lateritic soil between the Damrei mountains and the sea. The berries go green to yellow to red on the same string — and the same farm sells all four colours, because the colour is the ripeness.

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The road south from Phnom Penh runs flat through paddy and palm sugar country and the temperature climbs a degree the closer you get to the gulf. Kampot itself is a town of two streets and a river, the French shophouses peeling pastel along the east bank, the new boutique hotels along the west, the Durian roundabout in the middle with its fibreglass spiked fruit the size of a small car. The pace drops the moment you arrive. The clocks in the cafés are mostly wrong and nobody minds.

La Plantation is forty minutes out of town on a red-dirt road through the foothills. The pepper vines climb wooden tripods three metres high in rows, and the guide walks you down a row pulling strings off at random — green peppercorns are the unripe berries, sharp and herbaceous, eaten fresh in the stir-fry at the Kep crab market; red are the same berries ripe, sweet and floral, sun-dried for a week to make red pepper; black is red picked early and oven-dried until the skin shrivels; white is red soaked in salt water until the skin sloughs off. Four products, one vine, one harvest. The tasting flight at the end runs through them on a little wooden paddle with a glass of palm-sugar water between each one to clear the palate.

Bokor at the top of the mountain is a different country. The road climbs to 1,080 metres in forty switchbacks and the temperature drops ten degrees and the cloud comes in. The 1920s French hill station — the Bokor Palace casino, the Catholic church, the post office — was abandoned twice, once when the French left in 1953 and again when the Khmer Rouge cleared it in 1972. The shells are still there. Cloud blows through the empty ballroom and out the other side.

Chapter 05 · Dec 13 Day 9

Kep · the seafront

One last night on the Gulf. Blue crab still snapping in the wicker basket at the market, the 8 km loop in the national park empty by mid-afternoon, and the modernist villas of a vanished elite slowly turning green under the vines.

1 night

Drive Kampot → Kep · ~30 min · USD 15 by tuk-tuk, easy half-day there-and-back too

Out Kep → Phnom Penh (PNH) next morning · ~4 hr private car for the evening flight home

Things to do

Kep crab market lunch · live blue crab stir-fried in Kampot green peppercorn, eaten at the seafront stalls
Kep National Park · the 8 km forest loop above the town · empty by 3pm, views to Phú Quốc on a clear day
Rabbit Island (Koh Tonsay) day trip · 25-min boat, white sand, hammock, fresh coconut for USD 1
Abandoned modernist villas · 1960s Khmer-deco shells along the seafront road, slowly being eaten by the jungle
Sundowner at the Sailing Club · gin and tonic, the Gulf going amber, the fishing boats heading out

Kep is sleepy in the best sense · most restaurants close by 9pm · cash only at the crab market, small dollars and riel · last-day timing: get to PNH airport 3 hr before an international flight, the drive can hit traffic outside Phnom Penh

Bookings

hotel Kep · 1 night · seafront bungalow with hammock pending

flight PNH → HKG · evening departure pending

rental Private car Kep → Phnom Penh airport pending

Leave Kep by 11am for an evening flight

Chapter 05 · the story

The villas along the seafront road were built in the 1960s by a Phnom Penh elite that left in 1975 and did not come back. The Khmer-deco shells — flat roofs, breeze blocks, the curve of the spiral stair still visible through the doorway — are slowly being eaten by the vines. Nobody is rebuilding them.

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Kep is the smallest town on the trip and the right place to finish. The seafront is one long curving road of white-painted concrete tables and blue plastic chairs facing the Gulf of Thailand, and at the far end the crab market is a corrugated tin shed where the fishermen’s wives stack live blue swimmer crabs in wicker baskets that still snap when you lean too close. Lunch is the same everywhere — a kilo of crab, stir-fried in green Kampot peppercorns on the vine, USD 12 with a plate of rice and a Cambodia draft — eaten with your fingers at a table six metres from the water.

The 1960s villas along the seafront road are the second thread. Kep was the seaside for the Phnom Penh elite under Sihanouk, and the Khmer-deco architects — Vann Molyvann and his students — designed modernist villas in a tropical idiom of flat roofs, breeze blocks, deep verandas, spiral concrete stairs. Then in April 1975 the city was emptied. The owners walked out and did not return. The shells are still there, sixty along the seafront road, mostly unfenced, the jungle slowly pulling them apart. You can walk into them. The light through the breeze blocks falls in geometric patterns on the floor the way the architects intended, sixty years late.

The national park trail above the town is an 8 km loop graded for walking and almost empty by mid-afternoon. The path climbs through secondary forest to a sight-line that, on a clear day, picks out Phú Quốc thirty kilometres south across the water — Vietnamese territory since 1954, the boundary line drawn by the French and still contested in places. The Sailing Club at sundown serves a gin and tonic with Kampot pepper in the rim of the glass and the fishing boats head out as the sky goes amber. The trip ends at a white table, with a cold drink, watching the sea.

Dec 14 · Day 10 · the last one

Last crab on the seafront. Then the flight home.

Final morning in Kep, the Gulf flat and pewter, the abandoned villas going green under the vines. A bowl of pepper crab at the market stalls, iced coffee with condensed milk for the road back to Phnom Penh. PNH by afternoon, Hong Kong by night. Nine nights — every one of them yours, the sandstone faces still half-smiling somewhere behind the eyelids, the smell of frangipani and river silt already half-remembered.

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