When flying into Siem Reap you first wonder if you’ll need to be taking a boat everywhere. From the plane, everything looks flooded.

However, shortly before landing dry land appears.

Getting to downtown Siem Reap from the airport is a $5 tuk tuk ride. It’ll probably be the calmest tuk tuk ride you can get in Southeast Asia as Siem Reap is a small city with no traffic.

The most important thing to know about Cambodia is that you pay with US dollar for everything. Even the ATMs dispense US dollar. We learned about this when our transaction to withdrawal 400,000 Cambodia Rial (~$100 USD) kept failing. We were in fact attempting to withdrawal 400,000 USD. Good thing it failed as we don’t have a big enough money belt.

Siem Reap is a tourist town with a big western influence. It’s a nice break from Southeast Asia, but the downtown lacks local culture.

A visit to Siem Reap is the starting off point for the Angkor Archaeological Park. We went on a “small curicit” day tour which included the following temples: Prasat Baphuon, Angkor Wat, Bayon, Takeo, Ta Prohm and Banteay Kdei. This can be arranged with a tuk tuk driver. The tuk tuk will cost $15 for the day and entry tickets to the site cost $20 per person.

We read to skip Angkor Wat for sunrise and head to Prasat Baphuon. Unfortunately, it was closed until 7am but we still got to get in some misty shots of the pyramid-like temple with resonating monk chanting surrounding us while not seeing another soul.

After we found the temples that were open, we headed back to Angkor Wat. The incoming tourists were starting to pick up in volume.

We went back to Baylon and was blown away again. There are hundreds of faces carved and built into every stone. And monkeys!

Next we climbed to the top of Takeo.

Our favorite temple was Ta Prohm, the temple of the trees. This temple was left for the jungle to reclaim.

Last up was a quick walk through Banteay Kdei ending at the Sras Srang reservoir.

We aren’t number 1 anymore! –

We’ve all heard that Americans are the worst tourist. Well, the good news is it’s not true anymore! I suspect we got that rap years ago as our middle class blossomed allowing for naive Americans to start traveling. But, as the more we traveled the more and news articles, travel guides and blog posts were written and we started to learn about being a respectful tourist. As other other countries now have developed middle classes it’s their turn to travel and go through the same learnings as Americans did.

We saw some pretty bad behavior in Angkor. We watched tourist from other countries cross ropes to touch, pull and sit on ancient carvings. Trash was thrown all about the temples. In one incident we watched a group of tourists lean on giant stone elephant tusks to get their ultimate selfie. Just a couple feet away there were carvings with broken off tusks; hence, why everything was roped off!

Be a ChildSafe traveler –

Siem Reap had ChildSafe posters everywhere. We found it to be quite informative. Some posters educated you about the classic “powdered milk scam” while others educated you about not giving money to begging children. Their argument is that incentives drive performance, so if tourist stop giving money to begging children then they will participate in other social programs such as going back to school.