Rooftop Bars and Skyline Views in Siem Reap & Angkor Wat
A visual guide from the Siem Reap and Angkor Wat travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
There is no skyline here, and that is deliberate: building heights around Siem Reap are capped so nothing intrudes on the view from the temples, which leaves hotel water tanks and a few palms as the tallest things in town. What the roofs give instead is a low, wide horizon — tin and tile, mango canopy, the line of the river, and a sun that goes copper over rice fields to the west. It is a gentler proposition than Bangkok, and a great deal cheaper.
Rooftops in town
X Bar, at the Sivatha end of the Pub Street grid, is the long-running one: an upstairs terrace with a skate ramp on the roof that stays open well after everything below has shut. Several mid-range hotels along Sivatha Boulevard and the riverside keep top-floor pool decks with a bar attached and will usually sell an evening pass to non-residents, though it is worth asking at reception rather than assuming. The better drinking is often at ground level anyway — Miss Wong's small red-lit cocktail room off The Lane, and the quieter shophouse bars along Alley West a few metres from the noise.
Where the real views are
For elevation, go into the park. Pre Rup's upper brick terrace looks west across an unbroken canopy and gives the most reliable sunset at Angkor. Phnom Bakheng, on the hill between Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, has the classic view down onto Angkor Wat's towers but limits numbers at the summit, so people start queueing from mid-afternoon. Phnom Krom, above the lake 12 km south, trades temples for the Tonlé Sap turning gold. The sunset sites stay open a little later than the rest of the park but not long past dusk, and the tuk-tuk ride back is cold enough in January to want a layer.