Siem Reap

Angkor Wat covers roughly 162.6 hectares, making it the largest religious monument in the world by land area, built in the early 12th century under King Suryavarman II as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu before later becoming a Buddhist site. Cambodia is the only country in the world with a building depicted on its national flag, a distinction that reflects how central Angkor remains to national identity rather than just tourism marketing.

The temple sits inside the much larger Angkor Archaeological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992 that holds hundreds of temples spread across the surrounding jungle and countryside. Angkor Thom, the walled former capital, contains the Bayon temple, famous for dozens of massive stone faces carved into its towers, each looking out in a different direction with an expression that shifts depending on the light.

Ta Prohm, left deliberately less restored than other Angkor temples, has become one of the park's most photographed sites precisely because of that choice, with the roots of enormous silk-cotton and strangler fig trees grown directly through and around its stone walls over centuries. Its appearance in the 2001 film "Tomb Raider" gave it a lasting nickname among visitors, though the temple's slow reclamation by the forest was already its defining feature long before the movie existed.

Angkor is believed to have been the largest pre-industrial city in the world at its peak, sometime around the 9th to 15th centuries, with estimates suggesting close to a million residents spread across a metropolitan area built around an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals. Much of that ancient urban infrastructure remains only partially understood, still being mapped through ongoing archaeological and remote-sensing research.

Siem Reap, the modern town bordering the park, exists largely to support visitors to Angkor, and most trips settle into a rhythm of early temple mornings, when the heat and crowds are both more manageable, followed by afternoons back in town around Pub Street and the Old Market. A 3-day Angkor pass gives enough time to move beyond just Angkor Wat and the Bayon into the quieter, further-out temples that see a fraction of the visitors.