I first came to Siem Reap for three days and stayed for nearly two weeks. The town itself is modest: a lazy brown river, an old market, a few streets of guesthouses and noodle stalls. But just a few kilometres north, the forest hides the remains of Angkor, the capital of a Khmer empire that once reached across much of mainland Southeast Asia. There are hundreds of temples out there, from the vast and famous to small piles of laterite where a cow is usually grazing, and the light on them changes every hour.
These twenty routes are the mornings, afternoons and long day trips that I loved most: the big temples at their quietest, the far ruins swallowed by roots, the floating villages of the Tonle Sap and the lanes where you can cycle for hours between paddies and pagodas. Start early, rest at midday, and let the place take its time.
