Hiring a Tour Guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Park is Essential. Here’s Why

Hiring a guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park is essential when you come to Cambodia’s Siem Reap, our home for a dozen years and the departure point for the breathtaking UNESCO heritage-listed temple complex. Even if you’re not normally the kind of traveller who hires tour guides or does tours, you won’t regret hiring an Angkor guide and here’s why.

After 12 years living in Siem Reap, visiting Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park hundreds of times, and writing about the Angkor temples and travel and food in Cambodia, it never ceases to astonish us how many travellers to Siem Reap question the very need to hire a guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park and quibble over the very affordable price of doing so.

We get emails and queries on the subject in comments on the site, messages via DMs, and from travellers we meet. We see questions as to whether hiring a guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park is essential asked on social media platforms and forums time and time again. It’s a subject often discussed between expats in the tourism industry.

For expats in Cambodia, hiring a guide for Angkor Wat, Angkor Archaeological Park and remote temples is a no-brainer. Most of us wouldn’t think twice about hiring a guide for the first time we visit a temple, then return alone on subsequent visits. Even then, expats will still hire guides from time to time. Terence and I use guides when we’re working on a story, testing out tours, eager to go deeper, or looking to experience temples from a different angle.

Here are some reasons for hiring a guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park. And if you’re not a tour person, see our tips to guiding a tour guide.

Heading to Cambodia? See our guide to hotels in Siem Reap, itinerary for one day in Siem Reap, 48 hours in Siem Reap itinerary, our archaeologist’s guide to Angkor Archaeological Park and tips to how to get more out of your visit to Angkor Archaeological Park.

Hiring a Guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park is Essential. Here’s Why

Here’s why we recommend hiring a tour guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park.

Guides Provide the Best Introduction to Angkor

A good tour guide will provide the best introduction to the vast temple-city of Angkor Wat and the massive Angkor Archaeological Park that you won’t get on your own – from practicalities, such as how to buy your Angkor Pass (if you didn’t buy it online) and where to find the cleanest toilets to a good introduction to Angkor Park, the temple complex, visiting routes to take, and Angkor history.

The alternative is wasting time figuring things out yourself and reading a guidebook, book on history, or temple handbook as you explore the archaeological sites, which means more time with your eyes on a page than taking in the scenery around you. Or conversely, experiencing the temples without any knowledge and context of what you’re seeing and doing.

Tips: even if you’re not usually a fan of tours, we recommend hiring a tour guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park for the first day of your temple explorations for that important introduction. We can suggest guides we’ve used and loved, otherwise, we recommend Get Your Guide for hiring guides and booking tours.

When you’re on the tour, make sure to pick your guide’s brain and get tips to help you get the best out of the temples on the following days if you’re only hiring a guide for a day. Although personally, we recommend a minimum of three days with a guide for first-timers to Angkor.

Guides Have a Deep Knowledge and Experience of Cambodia Beyond the Guidebooks

Guidebooks are great, especially when they’re written by local resident writers who have been to the temples countless times, have a solid knowledge of the history, and have stayed on top of recent archaeological discoveries – and even covered them as Lara and I have for the likes of the Guardian, CNN and National Geographic Traveller over the years.

But as Lara, who has recently been updating the Cambodia chapter of a Thailand guidebook, was reminded: word counts restrict how much authors can write on the subject and how deep they can go. Travellers who want deeper insights into the history of Angkor either have to invest time in reading up on Cambodia before and during their trip – or hire a good guide.

A good tour guide will have a deep knowledge of the history of Cambodia, the Khmer Empire, and the pre-Angkorian periods. Only official tour guides can lead tours to Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park and their training course includes the breadth of Cambodia’s history, as well as knowledge of everything from agriculture and farming to Buddhism and Hinduism.

Mr Son, one of the Angkor tour guides we’ve been hiring for ten years, not only has a deep knowledge of the temples, but he was a monk and is a Khmer Rouge survivor. No matter how well researched or expansive, no guidebook or history book can match that first-hand experience of the genocide and Cambodia’s darkest period of history.

Guides Can Help You Get Off the Beaten Track

All Angkor tour guides are trained to take specific routes through temple sites and the larger temple complex. Travellers who prefer to get off the tourist trail aren’t always fans of going where every other visitor goes. But the goal of those defined routes is to help guide the flow of people through temples and through the Park.

Knowing the official routes and knowing when most tourists visit what temples, great tour guides can help travellers go against the flow, explore temples when they’re at their quietest, get off the beaten track, take alternative routes into popular temples, and take you to lesser-visited temple ruins that few travellers get to.

Tip: tour guides aren’t mind-readers so make sure to let them know how you like to experience places, otherwise they’ll assume you’re happy to do what everyone else does. Know, however, that if you do choose to take the routes less travelled, you might miss out on visiting the star attractions. The busiest sites are popular for a reason.

Good Guides Know the Great Angles, Vantage Points and Photo Opps

Great tour guides know all the photo opportunities. I’m not talking about the silly shots that you see some tour guides setting up for tourists. Yes, Angkor has the equivalent of those corny set-ups that tourists do at Pisa where it looks like they’re balancing the leaning tower on the palm of their hands.

I’m talking about the best vantage points for bird’s eye views and panoramic vistas and great angles that aren’t immediately obvious, even to professional photographers. If your guide suggests you scramble up a goat track to the top of Angkor Thom’s walls or slip into a dark crevice to see a secret carving, don’t ask questions, just follow – you might get to snap one of your most memorable images of the trip.

Great Guides Know How to Take Good Photos and Shoot Videos of You

Remember the days before selfie sticks and digital cameras when you’d ask a guide to take a photo of you? You don’t? Hear me out anyway. You’d get home and get the rolls of film developed and it would turn out that the images were blurry or your heads would be chopped off.

Not only do good tour guides know how to take great photos these days, they know how to use every kind of camera and smart phone – or can figure it out and follow instructions. They can also shoot great in-camera edited videos. So if your guide directs you to walk through a temple passage, turn left through an arch, and walk back toward the camera, just follow the directions.

You will probably be very surprised with the results. After spending a day with Mr Son, my friends ended up with some very cool little videos of them exploring the temples that looked professionally shot. They were even set to music.

Guides Can Give You Local Insights Into their Country, Culture and Food

Act like a travel and food writer and ask loads of questions of your temple guide and you can gain great insights into the country, society, culture, and even the food. Offer to buy your guide breakfast or lunch and ask them to take you to their favourite local spot.

While you’re slurping noodle soup, you can ask your guide questions about everything from what their favourite dishes are to what they eat at weddings. Cambodians love their food and are proud of their rich culture and most guides are happy to chat about their customs, traditions and rituals.

Tip: make sure to stipulate that you want to eat where the locals eat and do not want to go to the tourist restaurants where guides get free meals for taking clients.

Angkor Tour Guides Can Also Take You to More Remote Temples

As with the ancient Greek and Roman temple ruins scattered right around the Mediterranean, not only in Greece and Italy, there are remnants of the Khmer Empire temples all over Cambodia and in the neighbouring countries of Thailand and Laos, which were ruled by Cambodia’s Khmer kings for centuries.

If you’re hiring a guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park, and you’re also keen to get out to lesser-visited, more remote Cambodian archaeological sites, such as the ‘lost city’ of Mahendraparvata on Mount Kulen, such as Sambor Prei Kuk and Banteay Chhmar  near the Thai border, ask your guide if they can take you. They may also be able to take you to Khmer archaeological sites over the border.

Heading to Siem Reap and Angkor Archaeological Park? See our Guide to Things to Do in Siem Reap and during monsoon Things to Do in Siem Reap When it Rains. For families, we have a Siem Reap for Families Guide. Our Siem Reap Angkor Wat FAQs answers questions about visas, money, weather, what to wear, etc.

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