Angkor Grand Circuit with Somondy (Angkor Guide Sam)

We did the Angkor Grand Circuit (also known as the Big Circuit) on our first full day in Siem Reap by car with Angkor Guide Sam. Our driver was Ravi and our tour guide was Somondy. They picked us up promptly at 7:30 am as arranged and took us to the ticket office to buy our 3-day passes. There were no crowds.

The official tour guides in Cambodia are expected to wear uniforms. A person cannot be simultaneously a driver and a tour guide. Somondy started out in the tourism industry as a driver many years ago. He took the exam to be a tour guide about twenty years ago so he is very knowledgeable, informative, and professional. His English was so good Mama asked him where he had studied expecting him to name a foreign country. Turns out he’s a locally made. He has a dry sense of humour and he was patient with our questions (ahem, Mama’s questions), posed us for great photographs, made sure we were all safe as we toured the temples, and at one point showed us palmyra palms set up for their flower sap harvesting. Our driver, Ravi, hardly spoke but was always ready to welcome us back to the car with cold water and cold towels. Getting back into the air-conditioned SUV was a much-appreciated relief from the heat.

I had pre-arranged our Grand Circuit tour at the time of the booking. Communication by email and responses from Sophea Sam were very prompt. Therefore, Somondy was well prepared with the itinerary and I didn’t have to micro-manage. It was awesome.

This is the order in which we did the Grand Circuit Tour.

Pre Rup

A well-preserved temple-mountain built in the 900s as a Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva by King Rajendravarman II. It was his state temple. Tourists like to catch the sunrise or sunset here so it’s open 5 am to 7 pm. We climbed a set of very steep stairs to be rewarded with the views. It was a test for Mama in regards to her bad back, and I think the fear of heights in general, but Somondy helped her up and down.

East Mebon

An “island temple” that was surrounded at one time by Angkor’s main reservoir, East Baray. The baray (water reservoir) is now dry. This temple too was built by King Rajendravarman II and was also dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. It is best known for it’s restored elephant statues. It’s like a miniature Angkor Wat.

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Ta Som

A photogenic small temple built by King Jayavarman VII in the late 12th century. It was dedicated to his ancestors. One of its towers is overtaken by huge tree roots similar to the popular Ta Prohm on the Angkor Small Circuit. Here you can appreciate the skill used in carving these amazing temples so many years ago. None of this can be appreciated in photos or hearsay.

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Neak Pean/Neak Poan

A small island temple reachable only by a wooden walkway over the water.

Vendors and a music band of men who have lost limbs from land mines are at the entrance. Water filled the lake again in 2010.

The temple itself also sits in a pond surrounded by four smaller ponds so cannot be reached.

Preah Khan

The impressive walkway leading to this flat temple depicts the Samudra Manthan (churning of the Ocean of Milk) in Hindu philosophy. It’s full of Apsara carvings in good condition, passages, and walls covered with twisting tree roots. This was Jayavarman VII’s first capital before Angkor Wat was complete, and he dedicated it to his father.

Landmine Museum

Not a temple, but a quick add-on to the Angkor Grand Circuit route. It’s a museum designed to educate people about the use of landmines during the Cambodian civil war, and their effects on Cambodians up until today. I blog about the experience here.

Lunch Break

We were taken to a small restaurant situated in a tourist market near Banteay Srei. I wasn’t expecting anything exciting but the food was excellent.

Banteay Srei

Technically not part of the Grand Circuit but an easy add-on and the reason we decided to do this tour by car since it’s an outlier, further north of the Angkor Archaeological Park. This red temple is known for its intricate carvings, the finest of them all, and was built not by a king but by a royal Brahmin priest in the 900s. It is built out of pink sandstone and is known as “the citadel of women”.

Banteay Samre

An “Angkor Wat” style temple that is also not part of the Grand Circuit. This was added on by the tour company, Angkor Guide Sam, and I’m glad they did.

The symbolism of the temples of Angkor (translation “city”) was hard to grasp for us who had not done our homework beforehand. But as I said, Somondy was a great teacher. We learnt that most of the early Angkor temples were built as Hindu temples. Then King Jayavarman VII converted from Hinduism to Buddhism circa 1200 and in his building spree built over xx temples in his capital city of Angkor Thom as Buddhist temples. His successor Jayavarman VIII returned to Hinduism and embarked on a furtive spree of destruction defacing the Buddhist images and altering some back to Hindu. At the end, of course, Buddhism won and Cambodia is a majority Buddhist country today.

In Hindu philosophy, the temple is built as a representation of the mythical Mount Meru which is why so many temples, including Angkor Wat itself, are built in a mountain-like pyramidal shape and are surrounded by moats (baray – water reservoir). Many have five towers representing the five peaks of Mount Meru.

These were a lot of temples for the day but I’m glad we did them. After hiking up the first temple Mama decided no more stairs. Luckily, not too many of the rest included stairs. To be fair, these stairs are steep, similar to the Mayan temples M’sa and me visited in Belize in 2012.

The Angkor Archaeological Park is the largest temple complex in the world covering 400 square kilometres huge. It displays all the different capitals of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to 15th centuries. This was probably the largest city in the world in the height of the Khmer Empire. It is Cambodia’s most well-known and visited attraction. UNESCO deemed it a World Heritage Site in 1992. I could easily return and explore some more.