Angkor With Children: What Works, What Does Not, and the Heat

Parents worry that a week of temples will bore children rigid. Angkor is better at this than almost any historic site, for three specific reasons.

It is outdoors and you climb on it. These are not roped-off rooms. Children go through doorways, up stairs, along galleries and around corners, and the scale is enormous.

Ta Prohm is a jungle. Trees growing through buildings is a concept that needs no explaining to a seven-year-old. It is reliably the favourite.

The Bayon has two hundred giant faces. Counting them is a genuine game and takes as long as you need it to.

Children under twelve are free, on the strength of a passport showing the date of birth. No child ticket, no half rate - just free.

What does not work is the adult plan. Five temples in a day is a lot for an adult and impossible for a child. Two temples a day, both in the morning, is the realistic ceiling, and a three-day pass across a ten-day window is exactly the right instrument for that - see the pass guide.

Everything difficult about Angkor with children is the temperature, not the temples.

From March to May it is mid-thirties by late morning with no shade in the Angkor Wat courtyards or on the Bayon's upper terrace. Children overheat faster than adults and complain later than is useful.

The shape of a workable day: out by 06:30 or 07:00, two temples, off the stone by 11:00, pool until 15:30, something short in the late afternoon. Build the trip around a hotel with a pool and treat the pool as part of the itinerary rather than a treat.

November to February is a different trip - mid-twenties mornings, and the middle of the day is merely warm. If you have any choice of dates with children, choose these months.

Sunrise with children is a judgement call. A 04:30 start is brutal on a family and the pool edge is crowded and dark. Many families do sunrise with one parent and let the others sleep. Nobody regrets skipping it.

Practicals: more water than you think, hats that actually stay on, and a spare shirt. Loose cotton, and shoulders and knees covered for the upper level of Angkor Wat - which applies to children too.

Phare, the Cambodian circus is the best evening in the country with children. Acrobatics, live music, ninety minutes, and it comes out of a Battambang school that takes children from hard backgrounds. Nobody is bored.

The Tonle Sap floating villages are a boat ride to a village on stilts, which is inherently interesting. Check the month first - the lake reverses twice a year and in the dry season the houses stand on bare six-metre legs over mud. Our floating village guide says which village works when.

APOPO's HeroRATs in Siem Reap train giant African pouched rats to detect landmines. Children get to meet the rats. It is short, it is free of gore, and it explains something real about Cambodia at a level a ten-year-old can hold.

A quad bike or tuk-tuk ride through the rice fields at the end of the afternoon, when the light is good and the villages are out. Five minutes off the temple road and completely different.

A cooking class. Most take children, and pounding kroeung in a mortar is a good job for small hands.

Angkor Wat by bike is realistic for confident cyclists over about twelve in the cool months. The park is flat - see cycling Angkor.

Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Phnom Penh are not suitable for young children, and both sites say so. The photographs, the cells and the stupa of five thousand skulls are explicit. Prepared teenagers generally manage and often take a great deal from it; under-twelves should not go. If your itinerary includes Phnom Penh, plan for one parent to go while the other does the Royal Palace and the riverfront.

Do not visit an orphanage, and decline any tour that offers one. Paid visits to institutions housing children cause real harm however they are framed, reputable Cambodian operators stopped offering them years ago, and the practice has driven children into institutions who have living parents. The same goes for buying milk powder or school supplies from someone who leads you to a particular shop.

Begging children at the temples and the lake are a genuine dilemma. Giving money keeps children out of school because it makes them earning assets. Cambodian NGOs are consistent on this: give to an organisation, not to the child, however hard that feels in the moment.

Health. Dengue is present; use repellent at dusk. Bottled water only. The heat, not the food, is what actually spoils family trips here.