Sacred River & Timeless Temples: Kbal Spean and Banteay Srei Tour

This tour starts at 8:00 after you’ve had breakfast. Our guide and driver will come and pick you up and start the journey to Kbal Spean. We’ll head out of town along the National Highway No. 6 towards Phnom Penh. About halfway along the journey, we’ll stop at a local market call Dom Dek Market. Here, you can see how the locals do their grocery shopping in a local market.

From here, we’ll continue the journey to Kbal Spean which is known as “Bridge Head” in English. This is an ancient Angkorian site on the slopes of the Kulen Mountain Range, around 25km from the main temples at Angkor. The area is known as the “River of a 1000 Lingas” and contains a series of stone carvings around the Kbal Spean River.

We’ll then stop for lunch at a local restaurant before continuing our tour to Banteay Srei temple. Banteay Srei means the “Citadel of the Women” in English and it’s said that the carvings are so fine that they could only have been carved by women’s hands. It’s also known as the “Jewel of Angkor” because of it’s unparalleled beauty which you won’t see anywhere else in Cambodia due to it’s unique pink sandstone architecture.

On the way back to Siem Reap, we’ll stop at the Cambodian Landmine Museum where you’ll learn how years of conflict have affected Cambodians. From the civil war, the American bombings, the Khmer Rouge regime, to the occupation of Cambodia by Vietnamese forces, Cambodia has been devastated by landmines. Although many have been removed, there are still millions to remove.