The Last Quiet Temples of Northern Cambodia

The road to Koh Ker runs northeast out of Siem Reap through rice paddy and sugar palm, and for the first hour it is busy with the same minibuses that go everywhere. Then it thins. By the time the laterite towers of Prasat Thom appear through the forest there are perhaps four vehicles in the car park, and the seven-tiered pyramid at the centre of the site — 36 metres, steep, with a wooden staircase bolted to one face — has nobody on it at all.

Angkor takes something over two million visitors in a normal year and concentrates most of them into three temples across four hours of daylight. The Khmer empire, at its height, covered most of mainland Southeast Asia and built continuously for six centuries. The arithmetic of that gap is what makes northern Cambodia worth the drive.

Koh Ker

For twenty years in the tenth century this was the capital, after Jayavarman IV moved the court here from Angkor for reasons nobody has satisfactorily explained. The site holds over a hundred structures across a forested plateau, of which perhaps a dozen are cleared. The pyramid is unlike anything else in Khmer architecture — a stepped mountain rather than a temple, closer to Mesoamerica than to Angkor Wat.

It was also, until recently, one of the most comprehensively looted sites in Asia. The sculpture from Koh Ker turned up in New York, London and private collections through the 1970s and 1980s, taken during and after the war, and a sustained legal effort has begun to bring some of it back — the Metropolitan Museum returned a group of pieces in 2023. The empty pedestals are still in place. Standing in front of one with a photograph of what used to be on it is a specific and useful kind of education.

Beng Mealea and Preah Khan of Kompong Svay

Beng Mealea, an hour closer to Siem Reap, is the temple everyone photographs when they want Angkor without the crowds — a twelfth-century complex left largely uncleared, with the forest through the galleries and collapsed sandstone blocks you climb over rather than around. It is busier than it was and still nothing like Ta Prohm.

Preah Khan of Kompong Svay, further east, is the one almost nobody reaches. It is the largest temple complex the Khmer built by enclosure area — larger than Angkor Wat — and it sits at the end of a rough road with a village, a few water buffalo and no infrastructure whatsoever. It was stripped by looters over decades. What remains is scale, silence and the unusual experience of walking a major monument with nobody to tell you where to go.

The empty pedestals are still in place. Standing in front of one holding a photograph of what used to be on it is a specific and useful kind of education.

The thing to be careful about

Northern Cambodia along the Thai border is among the most heavily mined landscapes in the world, and while the temple sites themselves have been cleared and are marked, the surrounding forest in Preah Vihear province has not been. The rule is simple and absolute: stay on the path, do not walk into the trees for a better angle, and do not pick anything up. The Cambodian Mine Action Centre signs mean exactly what they say.

Preah Vihear itself, the clifftop temple on the escarpment that Cambodia and Thailand went to the International Court of Justice over twice and exchanged fire across in 2011, is open and reachable but sits directly on a contested border. Check the current position before going; it changes.

Doing it

A car with a driver from Siem Reap is the practical way — Koh Ker and Beng Mealea make a comfortable day, Preah Khan of Kompong Svay needs a full day and clearance, and Preah Vihear is best as an overnight from Sra Em. The Angkor pass does not cover these sites; each charges separately, and the money goes into a different pot.

Go in the dry season, from November to March, when the roads are firm. And go soon in the sense that matters: a new expressway and a rebuilt airport have already changed the traffic pattern around Siem Reap, and the northern sites are next on every itinerary that is looking for what Angkor stopped being.