Things To Do

1. Shopping

There are many places you can go shopping in the town and outskirt of Siem Reap. In town almost of shops own their business as private sectors. At outskirts and rural area nearly all are owned by NGOs or local community association to make fun for their processes.

Landmine Museum

This success was in recognition of his tireless work clearing landmines across Cambodia, helping children and families who have been affected by landmines, and the extraordinary story that brought him to where he is today. 

The Landmine Museum is an extension of that story and the successes he's had clearing these horrifying death traps from fields and villages around Cambodia. Once little more than a humble shack, Aki Ra's Land Mine Museum has been reincarnated into the Cambodia Land Mine Museum & Relief Facility -- a registered Canadian-based organisation -- which opened in April 2007 with the aim of building and developing the original museum's vision. 

The new centre includes an expanded museum, a dormitory residence for up to 30 amputee children and a school. The $3 admission fee is more than fair and helps to keep the museum running. They also take donations to help with a shelter for kids with landmine injuries and support for their families.

More details

6km south of Banteay Srey on road to Siem Reap, inside Angkor Park

info@cambodialandminemuseum.org

Angkor National Museum

For the first 45 minutes of our trip through the mammoth, 20,000-square-meter building, we didn't spot another visitor. The museum opened in November 2007, and its shopping mall-like feel contrasts with the thousands-year-old artifacts contained within it.

A visit is a comfortable, air-con alternative to visiting the temples themselves, and a nice educational supplement to the history of Angkor if you visit the park without a tour guide. It's composed of eight separate galleries, all connected by a vaulted corridor with a series of fountains and lined with what seems like all the Angkor limestone lion and demon heads missing from statues at the temples. After an explanatory film screening called Story behind the legend, you're pointed toward the galleries:

Gallery 1: 1,000 Buddha Images

This is the only gallery that's just one large room, rather than a series of maze-like alcoves, and the sight of all these Buddhas at once is striking. Hundreds of small and miniature Buddha figurines, made of metals, jewels and wood, all individually illuminated, line the walls here, identified according to the period they were made during and where they were discovered. In the center, life-size and larger Buddha characters are displayed. The display includes Buddhas from Banteay Kdei, Bayon, Angkor Wat and Preah Vihear. 

Gallery 2: Pre-Angkor Period: Khmer 

Civilization

This gallery and all the subsequent ones combine mural-size explanations and short films through maze-like rooms explaining Angkor history. The styles of figurines precede the trademark Angkor style, and there's a large collection of Lingas, Lintels and colonnades .

Gallery 3: Religion and Beliefs 

This room explains several of the most significant Hindu and Buddhist religious stories and folk tales depicted on Angkor temples, including the most memorable Churning of the Sea of Milk carved into the rear wall at Angkor Wat. Carvings of Buddhist and Hindu religious figures are concentrated here as well. 

Gallery 4: The Great Khmer Kings

The gallery focuses on King Jayavarman II, Yasovarman I, Soryavarman II and Jayavarman VII, those most responsible for Angkor's greatest constructions. Figures of the kings and relics from the temples they commissioned abound. 

Gallery 5: Angkor Wat

There's a large film gallery inside this section of the museum. It features beautiful, panoramic images of the temple and explanations of how it was constructed. There are also many restored figures from the temple itself as well as post-Angkorian wooden statues used for worship at the temple until several hundred years ago. 

Gallery 6: Angkor Thom

In addition to recovered artifacts from Angkor Thom, this gallery includes a history of and artifacts from the vast irrigation projects commissioned by the king who built Angkor Thom with his smiling face looking out from every tower: Jayavarman VII.

Gallery 7: Story From Stones

This room is one of the most interesting. It's a collection of stone pallets with ancient Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions. The writing on each slate is explained on placards below. The writing on them includes the declaration of the construction of a new hospital, lists of slave names, mediation of land disputes and adulation of kings and gods. 

Gallery 8: Ancient Costume

From Apsaras and kings to princesses and warriors, this room contains the busts and statues of distinct fashions and styles as they evolved throughout Angkor time. There's also a collection of ancient jeweler and headdresses. It's a clever segue to the final room -- the gift shop -- where upscale imitations of these fashions abound.

It's $12 to enter the museum, plus another $3 if you want to bring in your camera and another $3 for an educational headset. Sadly, like ticketing and management of the Angkor park, the museum is owned and run by a private company, so little of your admission money goes to Cambodia or to temple restoration (though what the company paid for the concession might). 

Still, it's perhaps better than these artifacts remaining in the hands of private collectors. A connected mall is still under construction but has a few open stores, including a Blue Pumpkin satellite, several souvenir shops and the sure sign of apocalypse -- a KFC.

More details

Road to Angkor

info@the-anm.com

http://www.angkornationalmuseum.com/

Opening Hours: Daily 08:30-18:30 

Kampong Phluk

Unlike its well-touristed sister, this is a stilted rather than floating village (you may see some floating raft houses about the place). It's a very different place between the wet and dry season. 

The houses are on six-meter-high stilts, so in the height of the wet the water is close to the top, but in the dry, the village is, well, dry, and so the houses tower six meters above you. During the dry most villagers move out into temporary shacks lakeside as that's where their livelihood is (it also saves them having to climb six meters worth of stairs daily). 

Kampong Phluk also has substantial mangrove  or "flooded" forest and a trip through by boat is part of the standard deal. 


While Kampong Phluk gets tourists on most days, it sees but a fraction of the trade of Chong Khneas and the extra time and expense spent getting here is well worth it. Kampong Phluk can be reached by boat from Chong Khneas, though you're better off travelling by tuk tuk or moto and then boat (wet season only) via Roluos village. Expect to pay around $40-60 for a trip here out of Siem Reap.

At the physical heart of Cambodia, an immense body of water is the soul of the nation. The great Tonle Sap lake not only sustains Cambodian stomachs, with its harvest accounting for more than 50% of Cambodia’s protein intake, it is also a source of immense national pride.

Tonle Sap Lake

Its uniqueness lies in events that take place far away in the Himalayan mountains. There, melting snows feed into the Mekong river and push down towards the South China sea off the Vietnamese coast. En route, monsoon rains further swell the great river before it meets the Tonle Bassac and the Tonle Sap rivers at a confluence in Phnom Penh. Here, the ‘might’ of the Mekong is sufficient to push the Tonle Sap back on itself, reversing its flow and flooding the basin area of the lake. In the process, the area of the lake increases five-fold, from 2,500 km2 to 12,500 km2. In some places, the water’s depth increases from one metre to 10 metres.

This staggering transformation is at the root of all of the other superlatives that can be applied to the Tonle Sap. It’s the largest lake in Southeast Asia, one of the most productive inland fisheries in the world and, a little creepily, holds the richest snake harvest in the world too. It is home to an exceptional array of wildlife biodiversity, depictions of which can be found on the walls of Bayon temple, recognition of their importance to the success of the Empire.

I'll seeya at the tree, in the middle of the lake
I'll seeya at the tree in the middle of the lake.
Such hyper-abundance is a consequence of the Tonle Sap’s life-giving pulse, the ebb and flow of its waters. Along the skirts of the lake, floating forests have developed where trees have evolved that can withstand being immersed in water for several long months, their falling vegetation creating an environment that is immensely rich in nutrients for fish and other aquatic life.

Being such a vital food source, so many fish have naturally attracted predators, in particular birds and humans. Not much more than 10 years ago, the area around Prek Toal village on the western side of the lake was found to be host to a wide array of bird species, many of whom were facing global extinction. This discovery triggered the Wildlife Conservation Society’s programme to protect the birds and their eggs from poaching by humans through creation of the Prek Toal bird sanctuary.

About one-third of Cambodia’s population live in the provinces surrounding the lake. But even with the super-abundant resources the lake provides, the people living on its borders are among the poorest in the country. Among the poorest of the poor are those who live not by but actually on the lake itself. Some 130,000 people in live in 90 floating villages specially adapted to exist in rhythm with the rise and fall of the lake’s waters. Their lives are precarious in many ways.

But despite its size and rich abundance, the Tonle Sap is a lake under threat. Cambodia has been identified as a country that stands to lose a great deal to climate change, and the most vulnerable area is the great lake. Human influence is having other damaging effects too, as the cumulative effects of over-exploitation, deforestation, agriculture, industrial pollution, dam construction, mining and the introduction of non-native species all take their toll.

The Tonle Sap is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a special area recognised and protected for its social, cultural and scientific significance. It is also a hugely significant body of water for Cambodians who have been too often caught in the confluence of economic and political tussles not of their own making.