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.
The tourists, who once fired the local economy, drawn by the awe-inspiring temples of Angkor Wat, have mostly stopped coming.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Angkor Wat, a temple complex in Cambodia, and the Inca fortress of Machu Picchu in Peru (pictured above) are often cited as places of world-historical importance where a vast influx of tourists may be causing serious damage.
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So are two Cambodian investments by Raffles's present owners: Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh and Grand Hotel Angkor in Siem Reap, a splendid colonial relic which will have a new life as a luxury hotel for visitors to the sublime temples of Angkor Wat.
The loss of Cambodia's artists spurred efforts to find survivors who could instruct future generations about the country's ancient arts, some of the instruments of which can be seen carved on the temples of Angkor Wat, which are up to 1, 200 years old, in Siem Reap.
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These are the delicate dancing girls carved in their thousands at the Wat and the other temples at Angkor.
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