Ten days is the length that reaches the islands without wrecking what comes first: four nights Siem Reap, one Battambang, two Phnom Penh, two on the Kampot pepper coast and one on Koh Rong. The fast ferry from Sihanoukville is 35 to 50 minutes; the wooden boats take two and a half hours.
| Day | Based in | What you do | Getting there |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Siem Reap | Arrive, buy the pass, learn the food | SAI to town: 45 km, 45–60 minutes |
| 2 | Siem Reap | Sunrise, Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm | 20 minutes to the park |
| 3 | Siem Reap | Banteay Srei, Beng Mealea, and the deep carving | Banteay Srei 37 km, about 50 minutes |
| 4 | Siem Reap | The grand circuit, Koh Ker, or the lake | Grand circuit about 26 km |
| 5 | Battambang | The norry, and the bat cave at dusk | Siem Reap to Battambang: 170 km, 3–3 |
| 6 | Phnom Penh | To the capital, then S-21 and Choeung Ek | Battambang to Phnom Penh: 290 km, about 5 hours on National Road 5 |
| 7 | Phnom Penh | Palace, museum, silk island | Central Phnom Penh is tuk-tuk scale |
| 8 | Kampot | South to the pepper farms and Bokor | Phnom Penh to Kampot: about 150 km, 3–4 hours |
| 9 | Kep and Koh Rong | Crab for lunch, then the ferry out | Kep to Sihanoukville: about 110 km, 2–2 |
| 10 | Koh Rong | One day that is not a schedule | Koh Rong to Sihanoukville 35–50 minutes by fast ferry, then about 4 hours by road to Phnom Penh or a short domestic flight |
Ten days is the length at which you can reach the islands without wrecking everything before them. That is the whole argument for it: at eight or nine days the coast has to be a day trip from Phnom Penh or a rushed overnight, and at ten it becomes a place you actually stay.
The shape is the classic overland route with a tail. Four nights in Siem Reap for Angkor and the outlying temples, Battambang for the bamboo train and the bat exodus, two nights in Phnom Penh for the Khmer Rouge sites and the palace, two on the pepper coast at Kampot and Kep, and a last night on Koh Rong or Koh Rong Sanloem. The fast ferry from Sihanoukville is 35 to 50 minutes; the old wooden boats take two and a half hours.
Be clear-eyed about the last leg. Cambodia's islands are good but they are not the reason anyone books this country, and getting to them costs you the better part of a travel day. If you would rather have a fifth temple day or a second night in Kampot, take it and end in Phnom Penh. If you want to finish a hard-working trip lying down somewhere with nothing to read about, the island is worth the boats.
A complete trip with a proper ending, travellers combining Cambodia with nothing else, and anyone who wants Angkor and a beach without pretending either is a day trip.
Forty-five kilometres in from Siem Reap-Angkor International, 45 to 60 minutes. Buy the Angkor pass at the Angkor Enterprise office before 17:30 — on four temple days the seven-day pass at USD 72 beats the three-day at USD 62, and it is valid on any seven days inside a thirty-day window, so nothing has to be consecutive.
Then eat deliberately. Khmer food is milder than Thai and sourer than Vietnamese, built on prahok fermented fish paste and on kroeung, the lemongrass, galangal, turmeric and kaffir-lime paste pounded fresh in every kitchen each morning. Fish amok, steamed in a banana-leaf cup until it sets like custard, and lok lak with a lime and Kampot pepper sauce are the two to start on. The pepper in that sauce comes from the farms you will walk through on day eight, which is a neat way to bookend ten days.
The town is a twenty-minute walk end to end and the good kitchens sit one street back from the photograph menus.
Work out how many temple days you want before you reach the ticket counter. At four, the seven-day pass is the cheaper ticket.
Leave at 04:30 for a 05:00 opening. Angkor Wat faces west — uniquely among the major Khmer temples — which is why the five towers silhouette at dawn and double in the northern reflecting pool. The southern pool is the quieter side.
Give the outer gallery a slow hour: roughly 600 metres of continuous bas-relief, the Churning of the Ocean of Milk on the east side, the central towers as Mount Meru. The upper level checks shoulders and knees at the stairs.
Angkor Thom in the late morning, Jayavarman VII's walled capital from around 1200 with the Bayon and its 200-plus faces at the centre; read the outer galleries, which show markets, a cockfight, a woman giving birth and the naval war against the Chams rather than any god. Ta Prohm last, roots deliberately left over the galleries, with an inscription recording the 12,500 people the monastery supported and 80,000 more in the villages feeding it.
Take a licensed guide today. Nothing in the Bayon galleries is labelled and you will otherwise walk straight past the best of it.
Banteay Srei first because it closes earlier: 37 kilometres north-east, consecrated in 967, cut in a pink sandstone deep enough to hold real shadow. It is the finest stonework in the country, it was built by a brahmin rather than a king, and it takes about an hour.
Beng Mealea fills the afternoon, 60 kilometres east. Angkor Wat's footprint, never cleared, crossed on boards over collapsed galleries with trees standing in the courtyards. Between Banteay Srei's precision and Beng Mealea's collapse you get the two extremes of what this civilisation left behind in a single day.
Evening for Phare's circus, which came out of a Battambang school taking children from hard backgrounds and stages acrobatic theatre about Cambodian life, or a classical Apsara performance — a form reassembled after the Khmer Rouge years from the handful of teachers who lived through them.
Phnom Kulen gets bundled into this day and charges USD 20 of its own outside the Angkor pass. Take it only when the falls are running, in or just after the rains.
Three good ways to spend a fourth day, and no wrong one.
The grand circuit — Preah Khan, Neak Pean, Ta Som, East Mebon, Pre Rup — is the emptiest thing inside the park. Preah Khan is the size of Ta Prohm with a tenth of the visitors and a processional axis you can walk alone. East Mebon's corner elephants stood on an island in a vast artificial reservoir, which explains Khmer hydraulics better than any panel. Sunset from Pre Rup rather than Phnom Bakheng, which caps numbers and queues from mid-afternoon.
Koh Ker is the drive: two hours north-east, capital for about twenty years in the 10th century, with Prasat Thom, a 36-metre seven-tiered pyramid you climb by wooden stair. It pairs with Beng Mealea coming home.
Or the Tonle Sap, which reverses twice a year with the monsoon. Kampong Phluk's stilt houses are in the water in October and on six-to-ten-metre legs above dry ground by March; Kampong Khleang is bigger and far less visited. Ask what the water is doing this month.
Neak Pean's reservoir empties in the dry months and the boardwalk crosses mud. Check before you build a morning around it.
About three hours south-west, or the Sangker river boat when the water is high — six to nine hours through floating villages, and the best transfer in the country when it runs.
Battambang is the quietest stop on this route: French shophouses on a river, a working market, no tour traffic. The bamboo train now runs on a purpose-built track at Banan, not the original O Dambong line, which is worth knowing before you buy the ticket; the carts and the ritual of lifting the lighter one off when two meet are still real.
Time the day for dusk at Phnom Sampeau. Millions of wrinkle-lipped bats leave the cliff cave in an unbroken ribbon for about half an hour — nothing, then a stream that does not stop. The same hill holds a Khmer Rouge killing cave with a memorial beneath the shaft, and meeting that here, the day before Tuol Sleng, is the right order to take the history in.
If the water is high and your schedule allows it, take the boat rather than the car. Nobody remembers a minivan.
Roughly five hours on National Road 5. Go early, because the afternoon is what this day is for.
Tuol Sleng was a secondary school until the Khmer Rouge turned it into Security Prison 21 in 1975. The classrooms hold the iron bed frames and the photographs taken of every prisoner on arrival; of the twelve to twenty thousand people held there, about a dozen survived.
Choeung Ek, 15 kilometres out, is where most were taken to be killed, and its memorial stupa holds some 5,000 skulls. The audio guide is narrated in part by a survivor and is the reason most visitors manage the site at all. Together they are half a day and nothing belongs after them. The riverfront at Sisowath Quay, where the city walks in the evening, is the right weight for what is left.
Take the audio guide at Choeung Ek even if you normally skip them. It is the difference between walking a field and understanding it.
The Royal Palace in the morning: a royal residence since 1866 and still lived in, so the apartments are closed and the Throne Hall is seen from outside. The Silver Pagoda alongside is floored with five thousand silver tiles, mostly covered now, and holds a Buddha of 90 kilograms of gold set with more than two thousand diamonds. The dress code is enforced at the gate, for everyone.
The National Museum next door has the best Khmer sculpture in the world and closes for lunch, so it is a morning stop too.
Afternoon on the river. Phnom Penh sits where the Mekong, the Tonle Sap and the Bassac meet, and Koh Dach, the silk island, is a short ferry upstream where weavers still work handlooms under their houses and sell at the loom for a fraction of Russian Market prices. Oudong, 40 kilometres north-west and the royal capital for over 250 years until 1866, is the alternative if you would rather have hills and stupas than looms.
Silk bought at the loom on Koh Dach is the one souvenir here worth planning around, and you can watch the piece being woven.
Three to four hours south, most of it getting clear of Phnom Penh. Kampot is a low river town of French shophouses under Bokor mountain, and the first thing to do is get out to a pepper smallholding. Kampot pepper carries a protected geographical indication, the first Cambodia registered, and green pepper picked that morning is a different ingredient from the grey dust in a shaker.
Bokor Hill Station above the town is the afternoon: a French retreat abandoned in the 1940s, reoccupied, and abandoned again in the 1970s, with a casino shell that sits in cloud most mornings. The road up is good now and there is new development on the plateau, so temper the ruin-porn expectations.
Finish on the river. Kampot's sunsets over the water are the reason two-night bookings turn into four, and an hour in a small boat through the mangrove channels is the most restful thing on this itinerary.
Buy pepper at the farm rather than in a city market. Red and white cost more than black and are the two worth the weight.
Kep is half an hour from Kampot and lunch is the reason to go. The crab market cooks blue swimmer crab, taken from baskets sitting in the shallows, with green Kampot pepper while you wait at the table. It is the best meal of the trip and it is not close.
Walk off the crab among the villas. Kep was built as an elite seaside town under the French and then by the Cambodian upper class, and the modernist houses were gutted in the war years; they stand roofless with trees through them in scrub nobody has decided what to do with. The beach itself is modest and grey, which is honest to say — nobody should come to Kep for sand.
Then west to Sihanoukville for the boat. The fast ferry to Koh Rong or Koh Rong Sanloem is 35 to 50 minutes; the wooden boats take two and a half hours. Sail in daylight and check the last departure before you order a second plate of crab.
Ferries stop in the late afternoon and do not run in bad weather. Build the day backwards from the last sailing, not forwards from lunch.
This is the day with nothing in it, and after nine days of 04:30 starts and five-hour drives that is the point. Koh Rong Sanloem is the quieter of the two main islands; Koh Rong itself has more going on and more noise with it. Both have long beaches, warm water and a thin strip of guesthouses, and neither has anything you are obliged to see.
If you want a reason to move, the plankton is the local one — bioluminescence in the water after dark on a moonless night, best away from any beach lighting. Snorkelling trips run from both islands and are pleasant rather than world-class; the reefs here took a beating and are recovering unevenly.
Then home. The ferry back to Sihanoukville, the road or the short flight to Phnom Penh, and 40 to 50 minutes out to Techo International Airport, which sits 20-odd kilometres south of the city. Give the whole journey a day and do not schedule an evening flight off the back of a morning ferry, because a boat that does not run for weather is the one thing on this route you cannot plan around.
If your international flight is in the morning, come off the island the day before and sleep in Phnom Penh. Weather cancels ferries and nothing else on this trip can strand you.
Everything north of Phnom Penh is temples and rivers. Everything south of it is pepper, sea and the wreckage of two French projects. Kampot sits on a river under Bokor mountain, about three to four hours from the capital, and is known for pepper grown on smallholdings you can walk through — it carries a protected geographical indication, the first Cambodia registered, and it turns up in half the dishes you have eaten all trip. Kep is half an hour further, a former elite seaside town of modernist villas left as shells, whose crab market sells blue swimmer crab cooked with green Kampot pepper while you wait at the table.
Bokor Hill Station above Kampot is the other half of the story: a French retreat abandoned twice, once in the 1940s and again in the 1970s, whose casino shell sits in cloud most mornings. The road up is good now, which has not improved it.
The islands are further again. Sihanoukville is the port, and the fast ferry to Koh Rong or Koh Rong Sanloem takes 35 to 50 minutes; the old wooden boats take two and a half hours. Budget a night on an island or do not go — a day trip spends four hours on boats to give you three on a beach. Be honest with yourself about whether you came to Cambodia for a beach. If you did, this coast is worth the three days it costs; if you did not, use them on Angkor and Battambang instead.
Itineraries written before 2024 assume you land ten minutes from your hotel. That has not been true for a while. Siem Reap-Angkor International Airport opened on 16 October 2023 about 45 kilometres east of town, replacing the old field that sat right beside the temples. The drive is 45 to 60 minutes in normal traffic and closer to 75 in the rains or at peak hour on National Road 6. Phnom Penh switched to Techo International Airport on 9 September 2025, roughly 20 to 24 kilometres south of the city centre, which is a 40-minute run rather than the 20 the old airport allowed.
Add that up and arrival day is not a sightseeing day any more. It also quietly changes the Phnom Penh to Siem Reap decision: the flight is 55 minutes in the air, but with two far-out airports and check-in either side it is about four and a half hours door to door. The bus down National Road 6 is 315 kilometres and takes five and a half to six hours, costs a fraction, and drops you in the centre of town rather than 45 kilometres from it. On that route the plane barely wins, and if you would rather see the countryside than a departure lounge, the road is the honest choice.
This is the single most useful thing to know before you book anything, and almost every itinerary online gets it wrong. The Angkor Archaeological Park sells three passes: one day for USD 37, three days for USD 62, and seven days for USD 72. The three-day pass does not have to be used on three consecutive days — it is valid on any three days inside a ten-day window from first use, and the seven-day pass runs across thirty days. That changes how you plan. You can do a sunrise day, take a day off for the lake or the countryside, then come back for the far temples, and the pass covers all three. Temple fatigue is real: by the fourth hour of the second straight day, most people stop seeing carvings and start seeing stone. Spreading the same three days over five is free.
Passes are sold by Angkor Enterprise, the state seller, at one ticket office about four kilometres out on the road to the temples. They are not sold at the temple gates, so a driver who says he will sort the ticket at Angkor Wat is wrong and you will be turned back. The office opens at 04:30 for the sunrise crowd and closes at 17:30. Bring your passport; children under twelve are free on it, and there is no student rate, no group rate and no half-day ticket. Buy online at the official site or in person — anyone reselling at a markup is not an agent, they are just a markup.
The dry season runs roughly November to March and is what most people mean by the best time: clear skies for sunrise, comfortable mornings, and the biggest crowds and highest room rates of the year. March to May is the hot season and it is genuinely hot, mid-thirties by late morning, which turns a full temple day into an endurance test. June to October is the rains, usually a heavy hour or two in the afternoon rather than all-day drizzle, and the temples are green, empty and far more photogenic than the brochures admit.
The Tonle Sap is the part nobody factors in. It is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia and it reverses direction twice a year — during the monsoon the Mekong pushes water back up the Tonle Sap river and the lake swells several times over, then drains again from about November. That decides what a floating-village trip actually looks like. In September and October the stilt houses at Kampong Phluk stand in water and the boats can reach the flooded forest; by March the same houses are dry sticks six to ten metres up in the air and the channel is a mud track. Neither is wrong, but they are different trips, and a tour photographed in October will not look like your February booking.
Only if you want to finish lying down. The beaches are good and the water is warm, but they are not why anyone books Cambodia, and getting there costs the better part of a travel day. If you would rather have a fifth temple day or a second night in Kampot, take it — that is a defensible ten-day trip too.
Sanloem is the quieter one, with fewer bars and longer empty stretches of sand. Koh Rong has more infrastructure, more nightlife and more people. On a single island night after nine hard-working days, most travellers are happier on Sanloem.
Reliable in the dry season and genuinely weather-dependent in the rains, when sailings get cancelled outright. The fast ferry is 35 to 50 minutes and the wooden boats about two and a half hours. Never plan an international departure for the morning after an island night; come back the day before.
Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, yes, though with both airports now well out of town the 55-minute flight is about four and a half hours door to door against six on the road. Sihanoukville has a domestic airport that shortens the way home from the islands. There is no useful flight to Kampot or Kep; that leg is road.
No, but ten days spent this way is a full trip rather than a relaxed one. Nine of these ten days involve either an early start or a transfer. If you want a holiday rather than a route, cut Battambang or the islands and give the time back to Siem Reap and Kampot.
November to early February: dry across both the north and the coast, ferries running, the lake still high from the monsoon, and the temples comfortable in the mornings. It is also peak season and priced that way. October is the underrated alternative — the Tonle Sap is at its fullest and the temples are green and empty — but the coast is still catching rain.
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