Casey and I spent a week here, with the two main activities being a visit to the Angkor Wat temple complex and a private bird watching tour we went on.
Bird watching tour
Casey and I booked a tour with the Sam Veasna Center, a Cambodian non-profit ecotourism organization. They picked us up at our hotel at 5:30am before sunrise and drove us about 40 minutes out of Siem Reap to fields and rice paddies to watch birds. It was really great! We were amazed at how well our guide could find birds.
Perhaps the best part of the trip was the 30 minute ride in the Tuk-Tuk back afterwards. We chatted with our guide about Cambodia, its history, its politics, Pol-Pot, etc. Very interesting.
Angkor Wat
The biggest tourist attraction of Cambodia is Angkor Wat. I actually hadn’t heard of it until reading up on Southeast Asian history prior to this December trip. So imagine my surprise when I learned that Angkor Wat, as seat of the powerful Khmer Empire, was the largest city in the world in the 11–13th centuries. The empire and city eventually fell and were lost to history for hundreds of years until the ruins were later discovered.