Tour Audio a Siem Reap

Siem Reap is the gateway city to Angkor, the vast Khmer temple complex that remains the largest religious monument ever built. The name translates roughly as 'Siamese defeated,' a reference to a 17th-century Khmer victory, but today the city's identity is entirely shaped by the temples that lie a few kilometres to the north. Those temples, constructed between the 9th and 15th centuries at the height of the Khmer Empire, stretch across some 400 square kilometres and include Angkor Wat, whose five towers reflected in the morning moat are one of the most recognisable images on earth.

The city itself has grown rapidly around its role as a tourism hub, and the streets around Pub Street and the Old Market are busy with restaurants, bars, and guesthouses at every price point.

But Siem Reap rewards those who look beyond the obvious. The floating villages on Tonle Sap lake, Southeast Asia's largest freshwater lake, shift with the seasons as the lake swells and shrinks by an extraordinary factor of five between wet and dry season. Local Khmer cooking, which relies on lemongrass, galangal, and the fermented fish paste called prahok, is one of Asia's less celebrated but genuinely distinctive cuisines.