We are traveling today from Cambodia to Vietnam on Qatar Airways Fifth Freedom flight from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. Now that we have spent the last 5 days or so in Cambodia, I wanted to share some tips that may help you plan a great visit to this wonderful (but very hot!) country.

Siem Reap:

This town is the gateway to Angkor Wat and other temples that date back about 8-900 years from the Khmer Empire. It’s still a relatively compact main town that you can get around by walking if you are staying at a well-located hotel like the Park Hyatt.

I would plan two days here: one to tour the temples and one for the town and its other attractions. It’s hot here all year but particularly so when we visited in April. You’ll want some time to just cool off in the hotel pool in the hottest part of the day.

We mostly walked around the town but you can also use the Grab app (similar to Uber) to get tuk tuks or vehicles to drive you.

It’s important to get a good guide for Angkor Wat who can help explain the context of the temples and the history of the area. Ours also had some interesting stories about the Khmer Rouge era in the 1970s and how he managed to survive that time.

As for food, there’s tons of street food but obviously it’s hard to know what to trust. We took a food tour one day where we tried about 7-8 different things, including visiting a local night market. We also had dinner at a really nice French-Cambodian restaurant called Cuisine Wat Damrak with about 9 courses for $45 plus some nice cocktails.

The new Siem Reap airport is about 45-50 minutes outside of town so factor that into your plans. We booked a car service to meet us and drive us to town via our Angkor Wat guide.

Phnom Penh:

The important sights to see in the capital are the S21 Museum and the Killing Fields. These can be visited in one morning. You can just make your own way there via tuktuk or car ordered via Grab. We just used a tuktuk to S21 which is fairly close to the center of town. For continuing out to the Killing Fields, we used a Grab car who ended up staying and waiting for us to use him again for the trip back to town. S21 took about 90 minutes to walk through with the audio guide and the Killing Fields took about 30-45 minutes.

Other sights in Phnom Penh include the National Museum and the Royal Palace along with a historic temple called Wat Phnom. All of these can be easily reached by walking or tuktuk from the major hotels.

We also enjoyed a food tour in Phnom Penh and we even found our way back to one of the same street food vendors the next night as we enjoyed it so much.

It’s a hectic place but surprisingly it works pretty well with all the motorcycles, tuktuks and cars getting around. You just have to get the rhythm of crossing the street and keep walking once you start crossing.

We got from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh via private car which took about 5 hours, including a couple of quick stops. It cost $90 which was less than the cost of two plane tickets and probably took about the same amount of time going door to door, hotel to hotel. I paid the driver $100 total including a tip. The poor guy had to turn around and drive all the way back to Siem Reap after he dropped us off.

Phnom Penh airport is about 25-30 minutes from the center of the city, but like Siem Reap, they are building a huge new one 45-50 minutes away that should open next year.

Cambodia uses two currencies: the Riel which is pegged at 4000 to the dollar and the US Dollar. There’s no need to change money as everywhere will price things in USD. However, if you pay cash and it’s not exact, you will get change in Riels. It’s much easier to use the Grab app for rides than trying to negotiate with drivers in Riels or USD. You just load a credit card in the app and pay that way. Make sure it’s a card that earns 3x on travel like CSR or Ink Preferred if you have one. All of our rides in either town were really cheap ($1-2). Even getting out to the Phnom Penh airport was about $8.

I hope these tips help you if you’re planning a trip to Cambodia. I’ll have a full review of our hotels, tours and other things we did when I publish the full trip report when we return stateside.

If you have questions about this post, let me know in the comments or send me an email at emptynestermiles@gmail.com. If you are thinking about opening a new credit card, please use one of my links.