Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
EXPLORING ANGKOR: TEMPLE ITINERARIES
There are around two dozen or so major temple sites at Angkor, scattered over a considerable
area. Package tours tend to follow rigid routes around the sites, although with a little ingenuity
you can tweak established itineraries and enhance your experience considerably. Time is very
much of the essence. It's horribly easy to end up rushing around breathlessly, so that one site
blends seamlessly into another and you end up templed-out and forgetting almost everything
you've seen. All the major temples in the environs of Siem Reap can be seen in three days (see
our recommended itinerary), although if you can spend longer than this - taking the temples at
a more leisurely pace and visiting them during quieter periods of the day - you'll be richly
rewarded (for details of the best times to visit the major sights, see the relevant accounts). Even
if you can only spare three days it's well worth making space to revisit the major sites - Angkor
Wat and Angkor Thom in particular - for a second or even third look at different times of the day,
as well as taking a sunrise or sunset trip to one of the major monuments.
TRADITIONAL ITINERARIES
There are two traditional temple itineraries - the Small (or “Petit”) Circuit and the Grand Circuit
- each sold as off-the-peg day-tours just about everywhere in town.
3
Small Circuit Around 30km. Starts at
Angkor Wat, heads north to the Bayon and
the rest of Angkor Thom before continuing
east to Thommanon, Chau Say Tevoda, Ta
Keo, Ta Prohm, Banteay Kdei, Srah Srang
and Prasat Kravan. The Small Circuit is
usually done in just one day, but really
contains too many major monuments to
properly appreciate in this time and is
better broken up and combined with the
Grand Circuit over two days (see opposite).
Grand Circuit Around 36km, or 44km if
you include Banteay Samre. Starts at Srah
Srang then heads east, via Pre Rup, East
Mebon (from where you can extend the
circuit to Banteay Samre), Ta Som, Neak
Pean and Preah Khan. The Grand Circuit
can easily be explored in one day (even if
you include outlying Banteay Samre),
leaving you with a couple of hours to spare
when you could visit one or two sights on
the Small Circuit.
Roluos The temples of Roluos - in a
slightly outlying area west of Siem Reap
- are generally covered in a separate
day-trip, although they could conceivably
be combined with the Grand Circuit in a
single, albeit long, day.
empire. Even now, Angkorian history remains hypothetical to some degree, with the
origins of many temples, the dates of their construction and even the names of kings
uncertain.
Angkor's earliest monuments date from 802, when Jayavarman II came north from
Kompong Cham to set up court at Phnom Kulen. The empire reached its apogee in the
twelfth century under the leadership of Jayavarman VII - the greatest temple-builder of
all - when it stretched from the coast of Vietnam to the Malay peninsula, to Bagan in
Myanmar and north to Laos. No further stone temples were built after the reign of
Jayavarman VII came to an end in 1219; either the area's resources were exhausted or
the switch to Theravada Buddhism may have precluded their construction. The region's
existing temples and palaces remained in use until they were sacked by the Thais in
1431; the following year, Ponhea Yat took his court south to Phnom Penh and left
Angkor to the jungle. Though Angkor was never completely deserted, the local people
who continued to worship at the temples were unable to maintain them.
Around 1570, King Satha was so enchanted when he rediscovered Angkor Thom deep
in the jungle that he had the undergrowth cleared and brought his court there, though
by 1594 he was back at Lovek. Another short-lived period of royal interest occurred in
the middle of the seventeenth century when, according to a letter penned by a Dutch
merchant to the governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, “the king [Barom Rachea
VI] paid a visit to a lovely pleasant place known as Anckoor”. Subsequently, despite
tales of a lost city in the Cambodian jungle filtering back to the West via missionaries
and traders, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that Cambodia opened up to
 
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