Siem Reap & Angkor
Siem Reap
At the turn of the millennium Siem Reap was a Cambodian provincial town with some minor installations. The tourism industry largely met the brave hikers willing to brave the winding road from the Thai border on the tailgate of a local pickup truck. The nearby ruins of Angkor in Siem Reap turned into a booming city in less than half a decade.
The huge and expensive hotels have sprung up everywhere. Real estate values have soared to European levels, and tourism has become a lucrative industry wide. Siem Reap today is barely recognizable from the Siem Reap in 2000.
To really understand the true of Cambodia, one must visit one of the great archaeological sites of the world; the spiritual heart and identity of the Khmer people: the Angkor complex.
Angkor Vat
One of the main Angkor Wat temples is as famous as the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, the Colosseum or the pyramids of Egypt. Angkor is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular architectural masterpieces still standing in the world today. Without it, it is impossible to assess the scale of the task faced by the builders of the time and the fact that they are in such good condition after all this time is further evidence for advanced construction techniques employed there are more than a millennium. Everything is built on a grand scale and one can imagine the astonishment felt by former visitors that civilization was at its peak. It is estimated that over a million people living there which makes the largest metropolis in its time. Witness the two tanks dug by hand that served the growing rice farming civilization:
Ta Kéo
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Le Bayon
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Ta Som
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Recently Siem Reap was a quiet little town ... It's from Siem Reap that one can visit the Angkor site and its mythical temples, but also discover the Tonle Sap, the old Siem Reap with its houses stilts and its waterwheels, markets, etc. Siem Reap is 300 km from Phnom Penh.
