You leave mid-morning, after the coach parties have done the sunrise and gone home for breakfast. The bas reliefs first – eight hundred metres of carved stone narrative running around the outer gallery, battles and gods and processions that take as long as you want to give them. Then up. The central sanctuary, the Bakan, sits at the top of steps steep enough that most visitors don’t bother. Up there it’s almost entirely Cambodians: monks in saffron, and women in white – devout lay Buddhists who come here to pray, not to look. The views across all two hundred square kilometres of the complex are, frankly, absurd.
Back in the afternoon. Time by the pool, the spa if you want it. A good way to start a holiday.

Day 3 is spent getting properly under the skin of Siem Reap. The city has more going on than most people give it credit for: colonial architecture, a thriving arts quarter, workshops where traditional Khmer crafts are still being made by hand.

The starting point is Phsar Chas, the central market, where Siem Reap does its actual shopping. Fish, vegetables, herbs, hardware, fabric, all of it across narrow lanes that reward the person who slows down. The camera earns its keep here: the subjects are everywhere and the Cambodian instinct is to smile rather than turn away.

That evening, cocktails at Bensley’s Bar: Shinta Mani’s open-air gin bar named for the hotel’s architect and philanthropist Bill Bensley. Part of every drink goes to the Shinta Mani Foundation, which funds education and healthcare in Siem Reap. One of those places that makes you feel good about having another round.

Day 4, out to Kompong Pluk. You board a hollowed-out canoe and move through a flooded forest of mangroves, trees rising out of the water on either side, completely quiet except for the paddle. The village sits on stilts above the Tonle Sap floodplain, houses towering six metres above the waterline. The canoes are run by women from the fishing community. One of those afternoons that’s hard to describe without sounding like you’ve made it up.

An early start on day 5. Angkor Wat officially opens at sunrise and the crowds arrive with it. We don’t go to the front gate. There are spots in the complex that most visitors never find, accessible before the coaches arrive, where you can have extraordinary light and no one else in the frame. Your guide knows where they are.

Then Ta Prohm. We arrange for a local monk to walk the complex with us: just him, just the group, for over an hour. The silk cotton trees have spent nine centuries pulling the galleries apart, roots the size of cars wrapped around doorways and walls. He’s happy to talk, happy to be photographed, happy to simply wander. There are moments in travel where the hair on your arms stands up. An hour alone in a nine-hundred-year-old jungle temple with a monk who has nowhere else to be. No other visitors. No time limit. This is one of those.

Back at the hotel in the afternoon. Salt water pool, spa, horizontal time.

Day 6 is your own until evening. Then a walk to Wat Bo, one of Siem Reap’s oldest temples. Arrive at prayer time and you hear the monks before you see them: a low, continuous chant that fills the courtyard and doesn’t quite leave you when you walk back out.

Day 7 takes you out of Siem Reap with our local NGO partner, an organisation that works permanently in rural Cambodian villages: running schools, providing food, offering training and advice to families who need it. This isn’t a visit to look at poverty. It’s a chance to see the work up close and briefly be part of it, helping out, talking to people, understanding how the operation runs.

The cooking class in a village stilt pavilion comes afterwards. You make a three-course Cambodian feast from scratch and eat it there. What you pay covers more than your own meal: the surplus ingredients go directly to families in the village who need them. It’s a good system. Simple, but it works.

That evening, Phare Circus. We arrive when the performers do: stretching in the wings, costumes going on, makeup being applied, the particular focused quiet that happens before a show. You’re backstage for all of it. VIP seats for the performance itself. Phare trains underprivileged young Cambodians in acrobatics, theatre and music, and puts them on a stage telling stories that belong entirely to Cambodia. Genuinely unlike anything else on the trip.

Day 8 starts optionally at dawn with a helicopter above the jungle canopy, all two hundred square kilometres of Angkor spread out below in the early light. For those who go, it tends to settle the question of scale in a way that standing inside the complex never quite does.

Then three of the less visited temples in the complex: Preah Khan, Ta Som and Bayon. Most visitors to Angkor never reach these. Preah Khan alone was once a city of a hundred thousand people: a Buddhist university with a thousand teachers and a thousand dancers. The jungle has been reclaiming it ever since.

Deep inside Preah Khan, adjacent to the central shrine, is a hidden chamber. Inside it, a jewelled bas-relief carving of one of King Jayavarman VII’s queens: undisturbed, unsignposted, not on any map handed to tourists at the gate. You need to know exactly where it is. Our guide does.

By day 9 you know what you came for. Some guests want to go deeper into the countryside: juvenile monks living in a remote temple, a morning spent quietly in their company with a camera. Some go back to the villages to spend more time with our NGO partners and the people they met earlier in the week. Some head to the big market on the edge of town, or lose a morning in the backstreets they keep meaning to return to.

We put together a tailored plan for each person based on what’s moved them most during the week. There are no wrong answers. A tuk-tuk costs two dollars. Cambodia is generous with its time.

A few things worth knowing about: the silk farm at Artisans d’Angkor outside town, where you can watch traditional weaving still being done by hand. The floating village of Chong Kneas at the northern edge of the Tonle Sap, different in character to Kompong Pluk and worth the journey. And Banteay Srei, a smaller temple an hour north of Siem Reap, carved entirely in pink sandstone with a delicacy that makes everything else at Angkor look rough by comparison. Most guests have never heard of it. Most guests who go say it’s their favourite thing they saw.

That evening, a private dinner by the pool. The hotel sets it up, the group sits together, and somewhere over the course of the evening someone puts their favourite image from the week on the table. It tends to go on longer than expected. Later, into town.

On the final morning, your guide sits with you one to one: a look back at the week, what you found, what surprised you, what you’re taking home. Not a critique. Just a conversation between two people who’ve spent ten days in the same extraordinary place. Then a light lunch, farewells, and the car to the airport.

You’ll leave wishing you had more time. They all do.