Overall assessment of Siem Reap Cambodia -

We really loved Siem Reap! It is admittedly the most touristy town in Cambodia, and considering it is the only place we visited, it wouldn’t be fair to say that we “know” a lot about Cambodia as a whole. We did venture out to some pretty rural villages in the surrounding area, so saw a bit of the real life, but not a lot. Cambodia is VERY poor (average income is $1,800 annually) most people survive by fishing or farming. The history is incredibly sad, but the people have such a positive outlook and might honestly be the nicest people of all of our travels.

Siem Reap was a really clean, pretty, walkable town with lots of bars and amazing restaurants and a river running through town. And Angkor Archaeological Park was unbelievable! We got around by tuk tuk which was fun. When you queued up a Grab (equivalent to Uber), you were picked up by a tuk tuk unless you specifically requested a car. Having just come from Vietnam, we appreciated that there wasn’t trash strewn everywhere and that there wasn’t constant honking (that really got old!). Even out in the rural countryside there wasn’t trash everywhere (Vietnam looked like an absolute junk yard in many places due to the piles of trash).

We regret only allocating 8 days to Siem Reap. To be honest, we never expected to like it as much as we did, so it got squeezed out by it’s more popular neighbors on each side. We feel like we might actually want to return some day and see more of the country… we liked it that much.