Hello Angkor is five years old! How time flies, it nearly passed by without a thought yet it was in June 2018 when the domain name HelloAngkor.com was purchased and the journey to where we are today had begun. From a blank canvas in 2018, the website has been through a few iterations and grown in scale and coverage, especially so in the last 3 years.
The site is fuelled by our love of Cambodia and the joy of exploring, and to date, we’ve covered over 30,000km in that time visiting 1481 sites including standing temples, ancient ruins, and pagodas. We’ve collated and curated a lot of historical notes for those sites, which is horribly time-consuming, and there is still a long way to go on that front.
In March of 2023, we’d reach a milestone having visited all the standing ancient temples in Cambodia. SO we thought! Turns out there was a secret temple, hiding away in Siem Reap and not noted on any map, we’d visit that one in July and finally tick off that milestone for us.
What does 30,000km around the temples of Cambodia look like? Here’s a selection of KML files from our travels laid out in Google Earth. It turns out it looks like the famed mythical bird, the phoenix if you use your imagination 🙂
To backtrack a little, the journey started in 2017 with the research and publishing of the small book Essential Siem Reap: The Must Carry Guide to the City and Temples of Angkor in November of that year and later adding a partner website (HelloAngkor) to that book which was later updated in 2019, and is well overdue for another update, hopefully before 2024. In those years, the journey was focused on Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor, and the pagodas between Siem Reap and Battambang.
It was in 2019 that the seed of insatiable curiosity was planted upon discovering a site called Persee, which collated all the publications of Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient (BEFEO), and here we are all these notes from the 1900s covering the French conservation efforts in Angkor and beyond. Thank you to the EFEO for making that data available for everyone! That led to the works of the early French explorers, Etienne Aymonier and Le Cambodge and E. Lunet de Lajonquière’s incredible journey and collation within Inventaire descriptif des monuments du Cambodge. The notes they left in those publications and the incredible maps they left us, created together with the local people of the time, still inspire and educate people to this day. They really are historical treasures, and there are many other works from that era and following, most are freely available online, and see here for a big list of those.
Lajonquire’s map from 1904 of all the ancient sites in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand is a particularly special piece of work as are the later maps produced by Parmentier. Hi-res versions and the full series of these maps are available from EFEO Archives and Gallica.
Although, it would be the work of the French-Cambodian team led by Bruno Bruguier and 15 years of work to bring together that historical data and locate over 4000 archeological sites across Cambodia including classifying temples by type including hospital chapels, firehouses, bridges, ancient roads, etc. The data from Bruguier’s mission would create the online database, CISARK, which is still online to this day and for decades has been the go-to reference for archeological sites in Cambodia. Together with his partner, Juliette Lacroix, and other co-authors, they also published comprehensive archeological guides of Cambodia in six volumes. Many researchers would build on that, Mitch Hendrickson and his work on the ancient roads come to mind, along with the lidar missions by Damian Evans et al, and many, many others.
We never would have been able to enjoy what we are doing today without the incredible contributions of their hard work, especially the Bruguier Mission, quite often I will be traveling down an old cow road en route to a temple, and I’ll stop and be thankful for that point. His maps are incredibly accurate, simply overlay them in Google Earth, get on your way to the village area, and ask for directions from there.
After exploring the greater Angkor area and lots of time in Angkor Thom, 2021 was the start of my travels beyond the Siem Reap area, ditching a small Honda scooter that had served me well since 2018 and following the fascinating ancient road network here and here, and visiting the major ancient bridges on an old Yamaha Nouvo.
The Nouvo was retired in late 2021 in favor of a new Honda Wave and doing a few trips up Phnom Kulen, then Banteay Meanchey-Oddar Meanchey, and then a 24-day loop around the country following Bruguier’s trail of big red dots. In early 2022 was my first tour of Preah Vihear which would be followed by five more. BUT, before those would take place, I’d by chance meet the wonderful Chanthim Suon at Wat Tnaot Chum, and she’d help me find the way to the two temples there, and a long story short, we’ve been mostly traveling together ever since!
With Chanthim onboard it’s made a lot of things possible that I could never have achieved by myself nor really wanted to do alone for that matter. By May 2022, we had visited some 654 sites and we’d travel together doing back-to-back tours in between Chanthim’s duties as a mother of two, and my own work duties, traveling to the well-known sites and those not so well-known, stopping at pagodas along the way.
We’d go on and travel around a further 18,000 km together touring the Mekong, the southeast inc. Phnom Penh and Pursat, Preah Vihear again, Kampong Thom to Kampot, Preah Vihear again, I’d do some local touring around Siem Reap province, and then together for three more tours of Preah Vihear here, here, and here, adding another 800 or so sites.
Together we’d tackle some incredible distances and challenging trails, camping in the middle of nowhere, and, have a great time doing it. We both seem to get a kick out of the exploring thing, heading to places we know nothing about and finding the ancient sites of her ancestors, using my ancestor’s maps 🙂
The journey has certainly had its challenges, but mostly enjoyable ones, two events that were not so enjoyable were getting sepsis from jungle vine cuts, which laid me down for some time, as did a head-on collision on road 6 just out of Siem Reap en-route to meet Chanthim, but that’s everyday life no matter what you do.
So, what does all that look like in the end?
That’s our journey so far. There are still a few dots for archeological ruins that we’d like to visit, all in good time. Let’s see what the next five years bring 🙂
Both Chanthim and I are very thankful to all the people who pointed us in the right direction, helped fix our bikes, gave us a place to stay the night, and helped us on our way. Thank you.