Phnom Kulen National Park

Phnom Kulen National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Phnom Kulen is the sacred mountain fifty kilometres north-east of Siem Reap, and it is visited as a day trip from the Angkor hotels, most often combined with Banteay Srei temple, which lies on the road, and sometimes with Beng Mealea or the Landmine Museum. The entrance ticket, bought at the checkpoint at the foot of the mountain, is separate from the Angkor pass and is included by most tour operators; check, because it is a large part of the cost. The standard day tour by car or minivan drives up the one-way mountain road in the morning, stops at the River of a Thousand Lingas, the reclining Buddha at Preah Ang Thom and the waterfalls, and comes down after lunch;

private versions let you linger at the pools. The trekking tours walk between the temples and villages on the plateau, including the ruined pyramid temple of Rong Chen and the Srah Damrei stone elephants, which the car tours do not reach, and the two-day trekking version camps on the mountain. Motorbike and jeep tours take the back tracks to the same remote sites. Cooking-class and village-life tours combine the mountain with lunch in a Kulen village. Independent visitors need a car with driver or a tuk-tuk willing to climb the road, and must be on the way up before noon because the road runs uphill only in the morning and downhill in the afternoon.

Visiting Phnom Kulen National Park: what you will see

The park, created in 1993, protects about 375 square kilometres of the Kulen plateau, a sandstone massif rising from the plain north of Angkor that is the most sacred mountain in Cambodia: it was here in 802 that Jayavarman II had himself proclaimed universal monarch, the act taken as the founding of the Khmer Empire, and the lost city of Mahendraparvata, mapped by airborne lidar in 2013 under the jungle of the plateau, was his capital. The sandstone for the temples of Angkor was quarried here and floated down the rivers. The visited sights lie along a few kilometres of the plateau: the River of a Thousand Lingas, where the riverbed was carved with rows of lingas and images of Vishnu so that the water flowing to Angkor would be blessed;

the pagoda of Preah Ang Thom with its eight-metre reclining Buddha cut from a boulder in the sixteenth century; and the two waterfalls, a small upper fall and the main one of about twenty metres dropping into a pool where Cambodian families swim on weekends. Further in are Rong Chen, the earliest temple-mountain, the tenth-century Krol Romeas enclosure, the carved stone animals of Srah Damrei and Peung Tbal, a boulder covered with reliefs, all reached on foot or by motorbike through cashew farms and forest. The plateau villages are poor and the park has suffered heavy logging, but the waterfall forest and the river are still green. It is a place of pilgrimage as much as a park, and Khmer visitors outnumber foreigners.

Phnom Kulen National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open daily from about 7 am to 5 pm; vehicles go up the mountain road before noon and come down after, so a morning start is essential. The rainy season from June to October fills the waterfalls and turns the plateau green; the dry season from November to April is cooler and clearer with weaker falls, and by April the water is low.

Weekends and Khmer holidays bring crowds of local families to the waterfall and the pagoda, so a weekday visit is calmer. Allow a full day with Banteay Srei, or two days for the plateau trek. Beng Mealea, the jungle temple, is on the same side of Siem Reap and is often combined, and Kbal Spean, another carved riverbed, is a nearer alternative for those short of time.