Siem Reap After Dark: Pub Street, and the Streets Either Side of It

Pub Street is two pedestrianised blocks in the old market quarter, closed to traffic in the evening, lined with bars whose speakers point at each other. Fifty-cent draught beer, neon, fire dancers, and a crowd that is overwhelmingly visitors.

It is not a scam and it is not dangerous. It is loud, cheap and exactly what it says, and for one night on a short trip it is good fun. Cambodians work there rather than drink there.

The useful thing to know is that the interesting part is one street back. The lanes around it - The Lane, Alley West, and the streets running off the old market - carry the small bars, the cocktail places and the kitchens that people who live here actually use. Same five-minute walk, completely different evening.

The Angkor Night Market and the several markets around it run from late afternoon until about eleven: silk, silver, krama scarves, carvings and a lot of identical printed t-shirts. Bargaining is expected and good-humoured. The food stalls at the back of the markets are better than the ones on Pub Street.

Fish massage tanks are everywhere along here. They are a novelty, the hygiene is variable, and any open cut is a reason to skip it.

Phare, the Cambodian Circus. If you do one organised evening in Siem Reap, do this.

It is not a circus in the animals-and-trapeze sense. It came out of Phare Ponleu Selpak, a school founded in Battambang in 1994 by young Cambodians returning from a refugee camp, which teaches drawing, music, theatre and circus to children from difficult backgrounds. The Siem Reap show is the professional company that school produces, and ticket money funds the school.

The performances are modern acrobatic theatre with live music, about ninety minutes, under a big top, and each one tells a Cambodian story - village life, the Khmer Rouge years, modern Phnom Penh, ghosts. It is genuinely good theatre and it is the thing people are still talking about on the plane.

Book ahead in the November-to-February peak.

Apsara dance is the other option and a real one. The classical form was rebuilt after the Khmer Rouge years from the handful of teachers who survived, and the hand positions are the same vocabulary carved on the temple walls. Take a ticketed performance at a proper theatre rather than a buffet-and-show package - the food at those is reheated and the dance is background.

Beatocello. Dr Beat Richner, the Swiss paediatrician who founded the Kantha Bopha children's hospitals, played cello concerts here for years to raise funds. He died in 2018; the hospitals continue and so does the tradition of fundraising concerts. Worth checking whether one is on.

Kandal Village, the small grid of streets west of the river, is where the independent kitchens and the good coffee ended up. Better cooking than Pub Street at similar prices and no speakers.

The riverside, north of the old market, is quieter again - a handful of restaurants along the water with actual tables outside.

Street food is a morning and evening thing here. The food guide covers what to order; the short version for an evening is lok lak, beef seared hard with a lime and Kampot pepper dipping sauce, and fish amok steamed in a banana leaf until it sets.

Psar Chas, the old market, has food stalls at the back that are cheaper and better than anything on the strip thirty metres away.

Cocktail bars in Kandal Village and on the lanes off Pub Street are genuinely good and cost a fraction of Bangkok. Several use Kampot pepper, palm sugar and local herbs properly rather than as decoration.

Angkor and Cambodia are the two local lagers. Fifty-cent draught is real and it is exactly the beer you would expect for fifty cents.

The single biggest mistake in Siem Reap is treating every night as a night out when the temples start at five in the morning.

Pick one night. Do it on the evening before a rest day or your last night, not before sunrise. A 04:30 alarm after Pub Street is how people end up sleeping through the best two hours of their trip. Where you stay matters here too - Pub Street noise carries across the river on a still night.

Getting home. Tuk-tuks wait at the end of Pub Street all night, PassApp and Grab both work, and a ride across town is a couple of dollars. There is no reason to walk far.

Some things to simply not do. Siem Reap has a visible sex industry and a well-documented child protection problem; Cambodia runs the ChildSafe network and posters are everywhere for a reason. Report concerns to the ChildSafe hotline rather than intervening. Do not visit an orphanage, and decline any evening tour that offers one.

Begging children work the strip at night. Giving money keeps them out of school by making them earning assets - Cambodian NGOs are consistent about this. Give to an organisation instead.

Drugs are openly offered around Pub Street and the penalties in Cambodia are severe. It is also a common set-up.

Drinks - stick to bottled water and to ice from proper machines, which is what bars use.