Old Quarter in Siem Reap & Angkor Wat
A visual guide from the Siem Reap and Angkor Wat travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
The Old Quarter is about six blocks. It runs from Sivatha Boulevard east to the river and centres on Psar Chas, the covered market the French laid out in the 1920s, ringed by ochre shophouse arcades. Before nine in the morning the wet end sells breakfast — num banh chok, rice noodles under a green fish gravy, eaten standing at a plastic stool — and by nine at night the same streets are a wall of neon and speakers. Very few towns change character that completely inside a hundred metres.
The walk
Start at Psar Chas early, while the produce sellers and noodle stalls are still working, then move outward through the arcaded rows: louvred shutters, tiled awnings, upper floors that look largely untouched since the 1930s. The Lane and Alley West, the two narrow parallel lanes, hold the better small bars and boutiques and stay quieter than Pub Street itself. Walk north up Pokambor Avenue beside the river, past the Royal Independence Gardens, to Raffles Grand Hotel d'Angkor, opened in 1932. Cross at the footbridge by the Art Center Night Market to pick up the east bank and the older villas around Wat Bo.
Eating and timing
The quarter runs three sittings. Breakfast belongs to the market; lunch to the air-conditioned cafés on Hup Guan Street in Kandal Village, two minutes west; dinner to everything else. Fish amok, Khmer red curry, beef lok lak and Kampot pepper crab are the dishes to work through, and the price of any of them climbs sharply as you move from a market stool to a Pub Street terrace. Pub Street is normally closed to traffic in the evening and is at its loudest roughly between nine and midnight. Mornings are for the architecture; nights are decidedly not.