Siem Reap

Siem Reap Cambodia

Gateway to the Temple of Angkor

Nestled between rice paddies and stretched along the Siem Reap River, the provincial capital of Siem Reap City serves as the gateway to the millennium-old ruins of Angkor - the Angkorian-era Khmer Empire. Designated a World Heritage Site, the Angkor Archaeological Park encompasses dozens of temple ruins including Bayon,  Ta Prohm and the legendary Angkor Wat whose artistic and archaeological significance and visual impact put it in a class with the Pyramids, Machu Pichu and the Taj Mahal. 

Siem Reap Town is where you will stay during your visit to Angkor. The area has been receiving foreign visitors to the temples for over 100 years. Nowadays, Siem Reap offers a wide range of hotels, restaurants, pubs and shops. 

Often missed are the many opportunities to experience traditional Cambodia: ‘Apsara’ dance performances, craft shops and silk farms, road tours through rice-paddy countryside, boat trips on the great Tonle Sap Lake to fishing villages and bird sanctuary, and much more. 

  

Siem Reap Hotels & Guesthouses

Siem Reap has an ever-growing number of hotel rooms, and a variety wide enough to satisfy most tastes and requirements. As there are no hotels within the Angkor Park most visitors stay in or near Siem Reap town. Though staying right in the middle of town is a bit more convenient to the popular Old Market, Pub Street and Sivutha road areas, the town area is relatively small and most hotels are no further than a 5-10 minute tuk-tuk ride of the Old Market area.

The airport is 6km west of town, a 15 minute ride from town center. The Angkor Park entrance lies 5km north of town. Hotels are spread relatively evenly across town, though there are some particularly popular areas: 1) the Old Market/Pub Street area with a wide range of hotels guesthouses, dining, shopping and nightlife; 2) several 3 and 4-star hotels on Airport Road and the road to Angkor; 3) budget places in the Wat Bo and Taphul Village areas; 4) a variety of mid-range hotels, restaurants and shopping through the center of town along Sivutha Blvd.

Siem Reap Restaurants & Dining

Siem Reap is a food-lover's delight, offering an array of dining venues and cuisines from Asia and the West. It’s easy to sample many types of Cambodian food, from traditional dishes like amok (a yellow coconut curry, usually made with fish) and luk-lac (cubed beef wok-fried in sauce) to adventurous contemporary and fusion fare, including some world class entries, such as served at the renowned Cuisine Wat Damnak.

Given Cambodia's long history with France, French cuisine also enjoys a very special place in Siem Reap, and is served at some of the town’s finest restaurants - Abacus and Paris Saigon amongst the highlights.

Eateries are scattered across town, though many are concentrated in the Pub Street and Old Market areas, especially along Pub Street and in the Pub Street alleys. And the choice in the area is quite varied, both in in the kind of food and the price - from Cambodian food on a budget at one of the Old Market stalls along Street 9, to plenty of family restaurants and a new upmarket places. It's an easy area to stroll and choose the restaurant or bar that best suits you. 

And don't forget, it's traditional to attend at least one dinner dance performance during your stay in Siem Reap. Several restaurants around town, including a couple in the Pub Street area, host nightly traditional dance performances, usually with a buffet or set menu.

Siem Reap Bars, Clubs & Nightlife

Siem Reap offers a booming nightlife and bar scene stretching to near dawn these days, with the bars coming to life around dusk as people return from the day's touring, and the last few pubs and clubs closing as late as 4AM.

Bars and tippling venues are located across town but the center of the action is the Pub Street and Old Market area where many of the most popular bars and clubs are clustered over several square blocks.

Pub Street itself, Street 8, is at the heart of it, lined end to end with restaurants and bars including such well known places as Angkor What? Bar, Temple Club, Le Papier Tigre and Red Piano. The Pub Street area alleys as well as the surrounding street also harbor a variety of places - cocktail bars, expat and tourist pubs,  eclectic little neighborhood places and more. The Pub Street area also has some of the latest running bars in town, including the Temple Club, Angkor What and X-Bar.

It's also worth checking out Sok San Street and the small streets around the Night Markets. Agrowing number of backpacker bars and unique little pubs have popped up in the area over the last year or two including places like Peace and Love, Relax Bar and Karma Bar. 

And if music is your thing, a growing number of bars in the Pub Street area offer semi-regular live music in the evenings, including The Warehouse opposite the Old Market, Triangle, In Touch and Banana Leaf on Pub Street and Laundry Bar on Street 9. The Zinc Bar at Herotage Suites hosts a very popular Live Jazz show every Thursday.

Siem Reap Bars, Clubs & Nightlife

Siem Reap offers a booming nightlife and bar scene stretching to near dawn these days, with the bars coming to life around dusk as people return from the day's touring, and the last few pubs and clubs closing as late as 4AM.

Bars and tippling venues are located across town but the center of the action is the Pub Street and Old Market area where many of the most popular bars and clubs are clustered over several square blocks.

Pub Street itself, Street 8, is at the heart of it, lined end to end with restaurants and bars including such well known places as Angkor What? Bar, Temple Club, Le Papier Tigre and Red Piano. The Pub Street area alleys as well as the surrounding street also harbor a variety of places - cocktail bars, expat and tourist pubs,  eclectic little neighborhood places and more. The Pub Street area also has some of the latest running bars in town, including the Temple Club, Angkor What and X-Bar.

It's also worth checking out Sok San Street and the small streets around the Night Markets. Agrowing number of backpacker bars and unique little pubs have popped up in the area over the last year or two including places like Peace and Love, Relax Bar and Karma Bar. 

And if music is your thing, a growing number of bars in the Pub Street area offer semi-regular live music in the evenings, including The Warehouse opposite the Old Market, Triangle, In Touch and Banana Leaf on Pub Street and Laundry Bar on Street 9. The Zinc Bar at Herotage Suites hosts a very popular Live Jazz show every Thursday.

Siem Reap Shopping

Whether you're looking for traditional Khmer handicrafts or chic contemporary fashion, Siem Reap is an excellent place to shop for all things Cambodian. In addition to classic Cambodian souvenirs, Siem Reap has a unique and growing variety of contemporary art galleries, fashion boutiques and trendy shops. Shopping venues are scattered across the town with a concentration of places along Sivutha Blvd., and near Phsar Chas (the ‘Old Market’) and nearby Pub Street. The Pub Street alleys, especially Alley West, harbor several distinctive small contemporary galleries and funky boutiques. For traditional items and souvenirs, start at the downtown traditional market, Phsar Chas, known as the Old Market.

Angkor Park: Getting Started

The Angkor Archaeo-logical Park is home to the magnificent temple ruins of Angkor, including the legendary Angkor Wat, Bayon and dozens of other ancient ruins of the, Angkorian-era Khmer Empire. The Angkor Park is a World Heritage site and encompasses more than 400 square kilometers just outside Siem Reap City in northwestern Cambodia.

Siem Reap City is the gateway to the Angkor Archaeological Park. There are no hotels within the Park grounds and most visitors stay in Siem Reap where almost all of the area's hotels and restaurants are located. Siem Reap City  is just south of the Angkor Archaeological Park with the Park entrance located only 3km north of town. With the exception of the Roluos Group of temples 13km east of Siem Reap, the most important temple ruin are within 6-25km north of town, the closest major temple being Angkor Wat. To arrange your visit to the Angkor Archaeological Park you will need to decide how long to stay, purchase an admission pass, arrange transportation to the temples, obtain a guidebook or tour guide and plan out your temple itinerary.

Tonle Sap Lake & Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary

Cambodia’s Great Tonle Sap Lake sits only 15 km south of town, a unique eco-system and cultural area offering the opportunity to see a different side of the Siem Reap - floating villages, cultural and nature tours, birdwatching.

The Tonle Sap Lake is the most prominent feature on the map of Cambodia - a huge dumbbell-shaped body of water stretching across the northwest of the country. In the wet season, the lake is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Asia, swelling to an expansive 12,000 km2. During the dry half of the year it shrinks to as small as 2500 km2, draining into the Tonle Sap River, which meanders southeast, eventually merging with the Mekong River at the 'chaktomuk' confluence at Phnom Penh. During the wet season a unique hydrologic phenomenon causes the Tonle Sap River to reverse direction, filling the lake.

The engine of this phenomenon is the Mekong River, which becomes bloated with snow melt and runoff from the monsoon rains. The swollen Mekong backs up into the Tonle Sap at the point where the rivers meet at Chaktomuk, forcing the waters of the Tonle Sap River back into the lake. The inflow expands the area of lake more than five-fold, inundating the surrounding forested floodplain and supporting an extraordinarily rich and diverse eco-system.

More than 100 varieties of waterbirds including several threatened and endangered species, over 200 species of fish, as well as crocodiles, turtles, macaques, otter and other wildlife inhabit the inundated mangrove forests. The Lake is also an important commercial resource, providing more than half of the fish consumed in Cambodia. In harmony with the specialized ecosystems, the human occupations at the edges of the lake is similarly distinctive - floating villages, towering stilted houses, huge fish traps, and an economy and way of life deeply intertwined with the lake, the fish, the wildlife and the cycles of rising and falling waters.

OtherThings to do in Siem Reap

As enthralling as the temples of Angkor may be, there are lots of other things to see and do in Siem Reap besides touring Angkor and hanging out on Pub Street - cultural and countryside tours, Cooking Classes, Traditional Dance, Cambodian Circus, the famous Landmine Museum, floating villages on the Tonle Sap...

Seeing a bit of Cambodia away from the temples can help avert ‘temple-burnout’ and round out your Cambodian experience. It also helps Cambodia by taking some of the tourist pressure off of the temples and main temple area, and it helps spread the tourism dollars a bit more widely. In addition to the following suggestions, check out the sections on visiting the Tonle Sap Lake and bird watching at Prek Toal, and on traditional dance performance.

Traditional Dance  *  Tonle Sap Lake  *  Birdwatching  *  Beatocello  *

Zipline Adventure  *  Pagodas  *  Silk Farms  *  Helicopters  *  Phare Circus  *  Cooking Classes  *  Massage Classes  *  Ceramics Classes  *  Countryside  *  The Great Escape  *  Golf   *  Tattoos  *  Landmine Museum  *  War Museum