April 2023 · Mindful Elegance Travel Journal
This journey was not just about exploring Cambodia — it was about discovering new facets of myself.
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Crossing Into Cambodia: A Border That Felt Like a Beginning
There is something about crossing a land border on foot that an airport cannot replicate.
Flying into a country, you are simply deposited; one moment you are elsewhere, the next you have arrived, with very little sense of the distance between the two. But walking across the Thailand-Cambodia border on a bright April morning, clearing customs on one side and stepping into a different nation on the other, I felt the transition in a way that was almost physical.
The air changed. The sounds changed. Even the light seemed different.
Cambodia announced itself immediately and without subtlety. The scent of unfamiliar spices drifted from somewhere nearby. The melodic rise and fall of the Khmer language surrounded us. Street vendors called from either side of the road. Everything was vivid, immediate, slightly overwhelming, and completely compelling.
I had been warned that Cambodia would get under your skin. Within the first hour, I understood what that meant, though I did not yet know quite how literally that phrase would apply.
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Day 1 — Siem Reap: First Tastes and Early Warnings
A Hotel That Understood Its Country
Our hotel in Siem Reap was a genuine introduction to Cambodian aesthetics, with intricate wooden carvings in the lobby, hand-painted silk panels on the walls, and staff whose warmth felt entirely unperformed. After the long journey from Thailand, it was exactly the kind of arrival that makes you feel the trip has already given you something.
We freshened up, stepped back outside, and went looking for dinner.
Cambodia on a Plate
Siem Reap’s restaurant scene is alive in a way that surprises first-time visitors, a busy, vibrant mix of locals, families, and travellers from every corner of the world, eating side by side in open-fronted restaurants along the main streets.
We chose a local place, deliberately avoiding the tourist menus, and ordered steamed fish and rice.
A word of honest caution for those who, like me, follow a Levitical diet: Southeast Asian cuisine, as beautiful as it is, requires careful navigation. Dishes that appear simple often contain shellfish, pork derivatives, or mixed meats that are not immediately obvious from the menu description, and in Cambodia, as in much of the region, these ingredients are woven into sauces, broths, and marinades as a matter of course. I found that asking directly and asking specifically was the only reliable approach. The language barrier adds a further layer of complexity; not every server speaks enough English to understand a detailed dietary question, and even with the best intentions on both sides, something can still be lost in translation. I ate carefully throughout the trip, chose simply prepared fish dishes where I could verify the ingredients, and treated each meal as something to approach with both gratitude and discernment. Travelling on a Levitical diet is entirely possible in this region; it simply requires more attention, more patience, and a willingness to occasionally go without rather than compromise.
The First Signs: Something Is Not Right
As the evening wore on, the first whisper of something unwelcome began to make itself known.
Not a dramatic announcement, nothing so clear as that. Just a faint heaviness settling behind my eyes. A mild warmth across the skin that was not quite the heat of the evening. A tiredness that felt slightly too deep for the length of the day. I noted it, filed it away as the reasonable exhaustion of travel, and told myself it would pass overnight.
It did not pass overnight.
I went to bed that night in a beautiful country I had barely seen, listening to the streets outside, alive with noise and light and the particular energy of a city that never quite settles into silence, and made a quiet decision: whatever this was building into, I was not going to let it win. Cambodia was three days. I intended to use all of them.
In hindsight, looking back at the environment I had just walked through, the warmth, the water, the insects that move through tropical air with an ease and abundance entirely unlike anything in cooler climates, I suspect the culprit may have been a bite rather than a bug passed between people. I cannot say for certain. But something had found me, and it had decided to stay.
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Day 2 — Kampong Phluk: Life on the Water
The Road to Tonlé Sap
The second morning arrived with the illness considerably more present than the night before, and considerably less interested in my itinerary.
Whatever had been a whisper the previous evening had found its voice overnight. The fatigue was deeper now, the warmth behind my eyes had become a genuine fever, and my body was communicating its displeasure with the kind of clarity that is difficult to argue with. I took what medication I had brought with me, forced down a small breakfast I did not particularly want, and got into the vehicle anyway.
There was never a serious question of staying behind. You do not travel to Cambodia and spend day two in a hotel room.
The drive to Kampong Phluk took us through the Cambodian countryside, and it was a journey worth making even without the destination at the end of it. Rice paddies stretched in every direction, impossibly green against the morning sky. Water buffalo moved slowly along the roadside. Children in school uniforms cycled in groups along paths between the fields. The landscape had a quality of quiet that felt almost deliberate, as if the land itself were asking you to slow down.
What Is Kampong Phluk?
Kampong Phluk is a cluster of three villages built entirely on stilts at the edge of the Tonlé Sap Lake, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia and one of the most ecologically productive bodies of water on earth.
During the dry season, the lake shrinks, and the village sits above mud flats. During the wet season, when the Mekong River reverses its flow and floods back into the lake, the water rises as much as nine metres, and the village, built for exactly this eventuality, simply rises with it. The stilts that seem almost absurdly tall in April are completely necessary by October.
The Khmer people have lived this way for generations. The architecture is not a curiosity. It is a deeply practical response to one of the most dynamic flood cycles in the world.
Arriving by Boat
We transferred to small wooden boats for the final approach, the only way in, and as we rounded a bend in the waterway, Kampong Phluk opened up before us. I was feverish, functioning on medication and stubbornness, and I remember thinking that if this was what illness in Cambodia looked like, at least the view was extraordinary.
The first thing I noticed was the scale of it. I had expected something small and photogenic, the kind of floating village that exists primarily for cameras. What I found was an entire functioning community: stilted houses in various states of repair and prosperity, a school, a Buddhist temple, a health clinic, shops selling essentials, and everywhere the sound and movement of daily life being lived without any particular interest in being observed.
Children paddled between houses in small boats with the casual ease of children elsewhere riding bicycles. An elderly woman hung laundry from a window fifteen feet above the waterline. A man repaired a fishing net on his front porch while listening to something on a small radio. A cat sat in a doorway and watched us pass with supreme indifference.
The Temple on the Water
Adjacent to the village, accessible only by boat, stood a Buddhist temple, small, colourful, and surrounded by water on all sides.
Its walls were painted in the vivid orange and gold that characterise so many Cambodian temples, and its reflection shivered in the water below it. Incense smoke drifted from a small brazier near the entrance. The contrast between the stillness of the temple and the busy life of the village around it was striking, a pocket of intentional quiet in the middle of everything.
I sat by the water near the temple entrance for a long time.
The Poverty Beneath the Beauty
I want to be honest about something, because it would be dishonest to write about Kampong Phluk without saying it.
The poverty here is real, and it is visible. Many of the houses are in serious disrepair. Access to clean drinking water is a persistent challenge. Children who appear in tourist photographs with bright smiles are often children with limited access to education, healthcare, and the basic securities that those of us visiting from wealthier countries take entirely for granted.
The community’s resilience is extraordinary and genuinely moving. But resilience is not the same as thriving, and it felt important to me, sitting in a boat that had cost more to hire for the afternoon than many families here earn in a week, not to romanticise what I was seeing.
I held both things at once. The beauty and the difficulty. The warmth and the hardship. Cambodia asked me to do that repeatedly over three days, and I think it is the right response.
I thought, standing there in that boat, about what it means to be a people displaced from solid ground, to build your life literally on water, because the land was not available to you, or not safe, or not yours to claim. That experience of precarious belonging, of making home in the margins, is not unique to Cambodia. It is a thread that runs through histories I know very personally. I did not say this out loud. But I held it alongside everything else I was seeing.
An Evening of Reckoning: The Khmer Massage
By the time we returned to the hotel that evening, the illness had fully declared itself.
There was no more filing it away, no more telling myself it was manageable. My joints ached. My temperature was clearly elevated. The effort of the day, the boat, the floating village, the emotional weight of everything I had witnessed, had cost more than a well body would have noticed. I was, to put it plainly, quite unwell.
I booked a traditional Khmer massage at the hotel spa, less as a luxury and more as a genuine act of necessity.
It is one of the older therapeutic traditions in Southeast Asia, a system of pressure, stretching, and manipulation that draws on both Indian Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese influences, brought to Cambodia through centuries of trade and cultural exchange. It is not a gentle experience. It is precise and sometimes intense, and it works.
Lying there afterwards in a state of complete physical relief, I found my mind drifting back to the floating village. The contrast between where I was and where I had been that afternoon was almost too large to hold. I did not try to resolve it. I just let it sit with me. Sometimes the most honest response to a complicated feeling is simply to acknowledge it.
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Day 3 — The Temples of Angkor: Walking Through a Lost World
Day 3: Medicated, Determined, and Going Anyway
I want to be honest about the state I was in on the morning of day three.
The illness, whatever it was, and I have since wondered more than once whether something in the tropical air or water, or more likely an insect bite in those first hours in Cambodia, had introduced something into my system that a standard cold remedy was not quite designed for, had reached its peak. My temperature was high enough to be concerning. My body was telling me, with some force, that lying still in a cool dark room was the appropriate choice.
I took a higher dose of medication, drank as much water as I could manage, and got dressed for Angkor.
Some things you do not miss. The largest religious monument on earth is one of them.
What Is Angkor?
The Angkor Archaeological Park covers more than 400 square kilometres of northwest Cambodia and contains the remains of the successive capitals of the Khmer Empire, the dominant civilisation of Southeast Asia from roughly the ninth to the fifteenth century CE.
At its height, the Khmer Empire stretched across what is now Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. Its capital, Angkor, was one of the largest pre-industrial cities in the world, home to an estimated one million people at a time when London’s population was around 100,000. The empire was a sophisticated hydraulic civilisation, its power built on an extraordinary system of reservoirs, canals, and water management infrastructure that supported intensive rice agriculture across a vast tropical landscape.
Then, in the fifteenth century, it collapsed, the result of a combination of military pressure, climate-induced drought, and the gradual failure of the water management system. The capital was abandoned. The jungle moved in. And the temples, built to last, as temples tend to be, remained.
As an Israelite, the story of a great civilisation brought low, its people scattered, its monuments reclaimed by time, its very existence known for centuries only to those who never left, is not an abstract history lesson. It is a pattern I recognise. Empires fall. People disperse. But what was built endures longer than those who destroyed it wanted it to.
For five centuries, much of Angkor lay overgrown and largely unknown to the outside world, though local communities had never entirely abandoned it. The UNESCO World Heritage Site was inscribed in 1992. Today it receives more than two million visitors annually, which is simultaneously a measure of its significance and a genuine challenge to its preservation.
On my third and final morning in Cambodia, heavily medicated and determined, I went to see it.
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Angkor Wat: The Temple That Became a Country’s Symbol
First Sight
The approach to Angkor Wat is designed to produce a specific effect, and it produces it without fail.
You cross a stone causeway 250 metres long, flanked by serpent balustrades, over the great moat that surrounds the temple, 190 metres wide and nearly five kilometres in circumference. Ahead of you, the five lotus-bud towers rise in graduated tiers, their reflections trembling in the moat water below. The whole composition is so perfectly proportioned, so clearly the product of an architectural intelligence that knew exactly what it was doing, that you find yourself slowing your pace involuntarily.
I stopped on the causeway entirely, at one point, and simply stood. I was feverish and aching and slightly light-headed from the medication, and none of that mattered in the slightest.
The Scale and the Detail
Angkor Wat was built in the first half of the twelfth century under King Suryavarman II, dedicated initially to the Hindu god Vishnu before gradually transitioning to Buddhist use, a shift that mirrors the broader religious evolution of Khmer society over several centuries.
It is the largest religious monument in the world. Its outer wall encloses an area of more than 820,000 square metres. But what makes Angkor Wat genuinely overwhelming is not its scale; it is the combination of scale and detail.
Every surface is carved. The bas-relief gallery that runs along the outer wall of the main structure is nearly half a kilometre long and depicts scenes from Hindu mythology in a continuous narrative of extraordinary intricacy and expressive power. Individual figures stand perhaps thirty centimetres high. Each one is distinct. Each face is different.
Walking through the corridors, I kept stopping to look at specific panels closely, a warrior’s hand gripping a weapon, a dancing figure’s foot, the feathers of a bird carved into stone nine centuries ago with a precision that a modern sculptor would not be ashamed of.
The people who built this were not primitive. They were extraordinary.
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Ta Prohm: Where the Jungle Fought Back
A Temple Reclaimed
Ta Prohm was built in 1186 CE under King Jayavarman VII as a Buddhist monastery and university. At its height, it housed more than 12,000 people, including 18 high priests and nearly 3,000 temple dancers.
Then the empire fell. The monks left. The forest moved in.
What you find today is one of the most visually remarkable places on earth: a temple in the process of being consumed by trees. Specifically, by the enormous silk-cotton and strangler fig trees that have rooted themselves in the stonework over five centuries, their roots flowing down over walls and through doorways and around towers in shapes that seem almost deliberate, as if the trees are not destroying the temple but embracing it.
The Feeling It Produces
Ta Prohm is the temple most people know from the Tomb Raider films, which were partially filmed here. The films capture the visual drama accurately. What they cannot capture is the feeling of walking through it.
There is something about the combination of human construction and natural reclamation, the stone and the root so thoroughly intertwined that neither could now be removed without destroying the other, that produces a particular kind of reflection. You are standing inside a conversation between human ambition and natural time, and natural time is, very slowly, winning.
The impermanence of everything we build is not an abstract idea at Ta Prohm. It is the view from every doorway.
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Bayon Temple: The Faces in the Stone
A Temple That Watches You
Bayon sits at the centre of Angkor Thom, the last capital of the Khmer Empire, built by Jayavarman VII in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. It is surrounded by eight-metre walls and accessed through five monumental gateways, each topped with four enormous stone faces gazing in the cardinal directions.
The faces follow you inside.
Bayon itself has 54 towers, and nearly every tower is carved on multiple sides with the same enormous, serene, slightly smiling face. The identity of the face is debated; some scholars believe it represents the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, others that it is a portrait of Jayavarman VII himself, presenting himself as divine. Either way, the effect of walking through a structure in which dozens of enormous stone faces gaze down at you from every angle is genuinely surreal.
The faces are not threatening. They are calm, even gentle. But they are entirely impossible to ignore.
The Monks
In the corridors of Bayon that morning, we encountered a small group of Buddhist monks, young men in saffron robes, several of them with physical disabilities, some missing limbs.
They were making music together. A simple melody on traditional instruments, played with complete focus and evident joy, the sound moving through the stone corridors and up into the open sky above.
I stood and listened for several minutes without moving.
I do not know their individual stories. But the image of those young men, in a place built to honour the divine, surrounded by stone faces that have watched eight centuries pass, playing their music with such uncomplicated presence, stayed with me long after I left Cambodia. It is, I think, the image I will carry longest from this journey.
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Reflections: What Cambodia Asked of Me
Cambodia is a country that does not allow a comfortable distance.
Its history is too recent and too brutal for that. The Khmer Rouge genocide, which killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people between 1975 and 1979, roughly a quarter of the entire population, is within living memory. The people who survived it, and their children, are the people who drove our cars, cooked our food, guided us through the temples, and smiled at us across restaurant tables.
And yet the warmth of the Cambodian people, their genuine hospitality, their pride in their history, their remarkable capacity to build a present life on top of so much loss, is equally real and equally impossible to ignore.
The children playing in the waterways of Kampong Phluk. The monks are making music in the corridors of Bayon. The temple dancer whose carved stone likeness I admired for ten minutes in a bas-relief at Angkor Wat, a woman who lived and moved and performed nine centuries ago and left her image in stone for me to find.
As an Israelite, I travel with a particular kind of attentiveness to these threads, the stories of people who built extraordinary things, lost everything, survived anyway, and kept their identity alive across generations of difficulty. Cambodia is one of those stories. It is not my story. But I recognise its shape. And that recognition made this country feel, unexpectedly, like somewhere I was meant to come.
This journey began as a suggestion from my husband, taken up with mild curiosity and no particular expectation. It became something I did not have words for until I was on the flight home, still feverish, looking out at the darkness below and trying to organise what Cambodia had done to me.
It had made the world larger. It had made history personal. It had shown me civilisations I had read about but never understood until I stood inside their ruins. It had asked me to hold beauty and difficulty in the same moment and resist the urge to simplify either one.
It had also, frankly, made me quite ill. And even that felt like part of the lesson, a reminder that travel is not a controlled experience, that the places we visit are not theme parks arranged for our comfort, that the same insects and water and air that sustain the people who live there can unsettle those of us who arrive from elsewhere without the same resistances. I am glad I pushed through. I would do it again. But I would pack better medication.
Cambodia, with its haunting beauty and complex history, will forever be part of my tapestry of life.
One thing I want to say here as a promise rather than a conclusion: the histories of this entire region, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, are far more deeply intertwined than most people realise, and they carry threads that I believe deserve a much closer examination through an Israelite lens. These are ancient civilisations connected by trade routes, religious movements, forced migrations, and the kind of cultural layering that I find myself recognising from other histories I know intimately. The Khmer Empire alone raises questions I have only begun to sit with. I intend to return to this region, not just physically, but historically, and when I do, I will bring that research properly into the light. Consider this journal entry the beginning of a much longer conversation.
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Practical Notes for Visitors
For those planning a trip to Cambodia and the Angkor temples, here is what I would want to know before going:
Best time to visit: November to March, during the dry season. April is hot and humid, and as I can confirm from personal experience, being ill in tropical heat is not ideal.
Getting there: Siem Reap International Airport serves direct flights from several regional hubs. The land border crossing from Thailand at Poipet is an option for those travelling overland.
Angkor pass: A one-day pass costs $37 USD. A three-day pass ($62) is strongly recommended; one day is genuinely not enough for Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, and Bayon. A seven-day pass ($72) is ideal for those with more time.
Kampong Phluk: Arrange through your hotel or a reputable local tour operator. Dry season visits (December to May) and wet season visits each offer different scenery, and both have their own character and beauty.
Dress code: Dress modestly when visiting temples. Shoulders and knees must be covered. Lightweight scarves are useful for this purpose and easy to carry.
Photography: Photography of monks should always be done with permission and discretion. Inside temple sanctuaries, follow the signage; some areas prohibit photography entirely.
Guided tours: A knowledgeable local guide transforms the Angkor experience entirely. The history behind each structure is too rich and too layered to navigate alone.
Health and insects: Cambodia is a tropical country, and insect bites are a genuine consideration, particularly around water and during the rainy season. Mosquito repellent is essential; pack a high-DEET formula and apply it consistently, including at dawn and dusk when mosquitoes are most active. I believe my own illness during this trip may have been insect-related rather than a standard virus, which I did not adequately anticipate. Consult a travel health clinic before visiting and discuss whether antimalarial medication is appropriate for your itinerary. Travel insurance that covers medical treatment is strongly advised.
Food and dietary requirements: If you follow a Levitical or otherwise restricted diet, research your options before arriving. Cambodian cuisine frequently uses pork, shellfish, and mixed broths in dishes that may not appear to contain them. Freshwater fish dishes, of which Cambodia has many excellent ones, are generally the safest choice. In Siem Reap specifically, the restaurant scene is international enough that careful eating is manageable, but always ask, always clarify, and always err on the side of caution.
Language: English is widely spoken in the tourist areas of Siem Reap and around the Angkor temples, but outside those zones, the language barrier is real. A few words of Khmer, ar-kun (thank you), som-toh (sorry/excuse me), go a long way in terms of warmth and goodwill, even if the conversation cannot go much further.
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Watch the Video
This journal entry is the companion piece to our Cambodia YouTube video. Watch the full visual journey at youtube.com/@mindfulelegance and checkout our curated finds
Filed under: Journal · Travel · Cambodia · Angkor Wat · Khmer Empire · Kampong Phluk · History · Mindful Travel · Israelite Perspective
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