Ta Prohm: The Roots, the Queue, and the Temple Next Door

Ta Prohm looks abandoned. It is one of the most carefully managed sites in the park.

When the École française d'Extrême-Orient began clearing Angkor in the early twentieth century they stripped the vegetation off temple after temple, because roots split stone and a cleared temple can be stabilised. At Ta Prohm they deliberately did the opposite and left the forest in place, as a record of how the whole city looked when it was found. Everything you see is the result of that decision, maintained since: props, cables, replaced blocks and cut-back growth, all kept discreet.

The trees are two species and they behave differently. The pale, smooth, elephantine ones are silk-cotton (Tetrameles nudiflora), which grow enormous and fast. The tangled ropey ones are strangler figs (Ficus), which germinate in a crevice up in the masonry and send roots down the wall to the ground. Nearly every famous photograph here is a strangler fig.

The temple was built in 1186 by Jayavarman VII as a Buddhist monastery and university, dedicated to his mother. A surviving foundation stele records the establishment's size in startling detail: more than 12,500 people attached to the temple itself, including 18 high priests and 615 dancers, and another 80,000 in the surrounding villages supporting it.

There is one specific tree - the strangler fig over the eastern gallery that appeared in Tomb Raider - and by mid-morning there is a line of people waiting to stand in front of it.

The worst window is 09:00 to 11:00, when the coach groups arrive after doing Angkor Wat at sunrise. The wait for that one photograph can be twenty minutes.

Go at 15:00 instead. Most day tours run Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm in that order and are finished by two. The light through the canopy in the late afternoon is also better than flat mid-morning sun.

Wooden walkways route you through the temple on a fixed circuit now, which protects the stone and means you cannot wander. Follow it; the best roots are on it.

The other trees have no queue at all. The Tomb Raider fig is not the biggest or the most dramatic, it is just the one people have seen. Walk on twenty metres.

If the queue has formed, the honest answer is to go to Preah Khan instead, and a good guide will offer it.

Preah Khan is larger than Ta Prohm, built by the same king three years later, dedicated to his father as Ta Prohm was to his mother, and left in a similar half-cleared state. Same silk-cotton trees, same roots through the same galleries, and roughly a tenth of the visitors.

It also has things Ta Prohm does not: a long processional axis you can walk end to end mostly alone, a strange two-storey building with round columns that looks nothing like anything else in Khmer architecture, and a Hall of Dancers whose carved apsaras run the length of a corridor.

It sits on the grand circuit, the loop outside Angkor Thom that most one-day visitors never reach, together with Neak Pean - a small island temple in a reservoir, magical when there is water and a mud crossing when there is not - Ta Som, East Mebon with its corner elephants, and Pre Rup, the better sunset temple.

Adding the grand circuit is the single biggest upgrade available to a two- or three-day Angkor trip.

Underfoot. Ta Prohm has more loose rubble and uneven stone than any other temple on the small circuit. Trainers, and watch your feet rather than your camera on the gallery thresholds.

Time. An hour is comfortable, ninety minutes if you want the far corners. It is usually the third stop of a small-circuit day.

Photography. The galleries are dark and the courtyards are bright, which is a hard exposure. Overcast days, which people avoid, are the best light here by a wide margin.

The Tomb Raider thing. Filmed in 2000, released 2001, and it genuinely changed the visitor numbers. Cambodians will tell you about it cheerfully; it is not a sore point.

Dress code. Ta Prohm does not enforce shoulders and knees the way Angkor Wat's upper level does, but you will be at Angkor Wat the same day, so dress for the strictest stop.

It is on the Angkor Pass with no separate charge.