The walled and moated city of Angkor Thom sits about a mile due north of Angkor Wat.
I'd be riding elephants in Chiang Mai, gourmandizing in Hanoi, and exploring Angkor Wat.
Sacked by the Thais in 1431 and abandoned in 1432, Angkor was forgotten for a few centuries.
The new airline will be called Cambodia Airlines, not to be confused with state-owned Cambodia Angkor Air.
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During half-millennia of Khmer occupation, the city of Angkor became a pilgrimage destination of importance throughout Southeastern Asia.
These are the delicate dancing girls carved in their thousands at the Wat and the other temples at Angkor.
The tourists, who once fired the local economy, drawn by the awe-inspiring temples of Angkor Wat, have mostly stopped coming.
For over 65 years, from Abu Simbel to Angkor, UNESCO has been at the forefront of world heritage rescue and protection operations.
As she guided tourists to the ancient Angkor Wat temples in Siem Reap, she saw children begging tourists for money at the temples.
The genius of Indian art, as Jawaharlal Nehru pointed out, also graced the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia and the Borobudur in Java.
Snow artists have also been let loose on the designs, and igloos sport fanciful carvings of anything from swans to the stone faces of Angkor.
Comparable in scale to Cambodia's Angkor Wat, currently "you can get huge parts of it all to yourself, " says Lonely Planet's USA editor, Robert Reid.
Most people believed the stories to be nothing more than legend however, until the French explorer Henri Mouhot brought Angkor to the world's attention in 1860.
Mr Hun Sen is said to be obsessed with Cambodia's ancient Khmer kingdom, which built the awesome Angkor Wat complex and once ruled much of Indochina.
Monastic communities continue to live throughout Angkor, with Buddhist monks often passing through the historic sites on their way to and from their pagodas (a blend of temple and monastery).
Dr Buckley's data, however, suggest another possibility that Angkor's canals and reservoirs ran dry and that the invasions were therefore a consequence of decline, rather than its cause.
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Then, guests travel to Angkor Wat, taking in spectacular aerial views of Prasat Kravan, Srah Srang, Pre Rup, Ta Som and East Mebon temples on the 45-minute flight.
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Known today, rather prosaically, as Angkor Archaeological Park, the 150-square-mile site was the political and cultural centre of the Khmer empire and at its peak supported a population of one million.
At Ta Prohm, to the northeast of Angkor Wat, strangler figs spill like liquid over 39 temples in various stages of ruination, creating a tangle of tipsy roofs and dark hallways.
When it was completed in the early 13th Century, Banteay Chhmar was one of the largest and most important religious sites in the kingdom, rivalling Angkor Wat in size and grandeur.
In Cambodia, Angkor has always symbolized the dream of unity.
Large-scale renovation projects have been carried out at sites like Angkor and ground-breaking case studies have been published on the effects of climate change on sites around the world.
Mystics, backpackers, new-age yuppies and thousands of others are expected to show up at Cambodia's famed Angkor Wat complex, which will be enshrouded in darkness for one minute 48 seconds.
From there 12 vertiginous staircases lead to the top level - the centre of the universe, since Angkor Wat is a model of Mount Meru which in Hindu mythology represents the cosmos.
For cruisers looking to learn more about Asian history, there are several sites worth visiting on extended shore excursions, in addition to the obvious ones like the Great Wall and Angkor Wat.
This was the period when the city of Angkor in present-day Cambodia went into rapid decline, a fact that some historians have blamed on invasions by the rival Siamese and Champa kingdoms.
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At ancient Angkor, for example, Phnom Bakheng temple is a prime spot for sunset viewing, which results in a lot of tourists congregating, climbing on ancient sculptures and platforms, and leaving empty water and beer bottles.
With its comparably haunting scenery, including rice fields in the south and misty mountains in the north, its temples, some of which predate Angkor Wat, and its relative lack of crowds, Laos, ready or not, may just be it.
Unlike other temples at Angkor, Ta Prohm has been left as it was found, preserved as an example of what a tropical forest will do to an architectural monument when the protective hands of humans are withdrawn.
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