KhmerRooms Journal
Stories & Guides
Cambodia, written from the inside — temples, towns and coast, with the local move every time.
New Post
KhmerRooms Journal · Koh Rong
Long Beach
Cambodia’s coastline hides a beach that looks photoshopped. On the western side of Koh Rong, Long Beach unrolls for kilometres of soft white sand against water in three shades of blue — the kind of place foreign travellers fly across the world for, sitting quietly a couple of hours from our own doorstep. It is the antidote to a city week: no traffic, no horns, just the sea doing its thing.
KhmerRooms Journal · Siem Reap
Bayon Temple
If Angkor Wat is the postcard, Bayon is the one that gets under your skin. You walk in expecting a smaller temple and instead you find yourself standing in a forest of stone faces — huge, calm, half-smiling — looking down at you from every direction at once. There is nowhere to stand where you are not being watched, and somehow it doesn’t feel threatening. It feels like the whole building is at peace with you.
June 14, 2026
Read more
KhmerRooms Journal · Siem Reap
Ta Prohm Temple
Some temples impress you with order. Ta Prohm does the opposite it impresses you with surrender. Massive silk-cotton and strangler-fig trees have grown straight out of the rooftops and walls, their roots pouring over the stone like frozen waterfalls, prying the blocks apart one slow millimetre a year. It is the one temple where you can actually see the jungle and the empire arm-wrestling, and for once the building is losing.
June 13, 2026
Read more
KhmerRooms Journal · Siem Reap
Angkor Wat
You have seen it a thousand times before you ever stand in front of it. It’s on the flag. It’s on the beer bottle, the riel note, the back of the school exercise book, the logo of half the businesses in town. Angkor Wat is so woven into being Khmer that it can start to feel like wallpaper — beautiful, familiar, easy to scroll past. And then you go at five in the morning, the sky behind it turns the colour of a ripe mango, those five stone towers appear upside-down in the water at your feet, and you understand why your great-grandparents thought gods had a hand in building it.
June 13, 2026
Read more