Cambodia

As you can't hire motorbikes in Siem Reap, there are two options to see Angkor, bicycle or tuk tuk. The tuk tuk price ranges. We were quoted many dif. prices but the lowest was around $8 for a small tour. Other people we spoke to said they paid $15. For $16 I was quoted to go from Siem Reap to Rolous (13km) to the 'woman temple' which is some 30km away as well as the nearby waterfall. So basically $15 would mean you could be driven around all day. Being on a budget and in need of exercise we chose to hire a bicycle $1/day. These are ordinary gearless bikes for $2 you can hire a full suspension mountain bike from the internet cafe on the left on the way to Garden Village Guesthouse. To give you an idea of what it means to ride, below is a map. It takes about 30-40mins. to ride from Siem Reap to Angkor Wat (lower blue square). So, to ride a whole loop up to Angkor Krau and across to Srah Srang and back to Siem Reap would be 3-4hours. In reality you could expect it to take 12 hours if you stop at all the temples on the way. Leaving at 6am getting back at 6pm. Below is what we did.
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The first day was tough getting used to the bike. We got our ticket. You can choose 1 day, 3 day, or 1 week. The 3 day ticket can be 3 consecutive days or any 3 days in 1 week but you must choose first. If you choose consecutive, they punch three holes in your ticket otherwise you must go back each day and have your ticket punched. It is on the way so it's no problem. From there we turned left at the Angkor Wat moat. Skipped Angkor and the hill side temple Phnom Bakheng and headed straight for Angkor Thom. There are a couple of small temples on the way visible from the road and the great thing about the bike is that you can ride right up to them and even around most of them, also you don't really need a ticket for this. If you wanted to spend a day riding around and looking at the temples without going inside, you could. Tickets are only checked at the big temples as you enter. But even most of those have a cycle track going around them.

We Did Bayon first, then the Royal Palace, Baphoon and Lepor and Elephant terrace. The bike was really good for this area, as you can ride to all these places, the main entrances look like you can't ride through but look around there are many bike paths. Next, we continued North to Preah Khan but chose to go home after that. We should have done more on this day. We missed the right side of Angkor Thom. I think we should have done that and Ta Keo and then gone back to Phnom Bakheng.
Day two. We continued from where we left off following the red path around doing all the ones we missed and then going to Angkor Wat from the back side. You cannot take the bike inside, so Angkor took up a lot of time because we had to go right through and then back to the bike and it is really quite big.
Day three. We went to Rolous group which was quite far but just to give you an idea we did all of the temples there and then rode all the way back to Angkor because we missed some temples to the right of the red path. So, it is possible to do all of that in one day but obviously very hard. If I went back, I would choose to use a bike again because the scenery was so nice, and it was great to be able to ride around the temples and cover so much ground so quickly.

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Where I stayed
Garden Village Guesthouse - #434, Sok San Street, Siem Reap, CambodiaBaca lagi