I Woke Up at 4am for Angkor Wat — Was It Worth It?
Short answer: yes. Obviously. Stop asking.
Long answer: here’s everything about it.
Angkor Wat is one of those places that exists in the background of your mind for years before you actually get there. You see the photos — the reflection in the moat at sunrise, the stone temples being slowly eaten by tree roots, the sheer scale of it — and you think “one day.”
I made one day happen at 4am on a Tuesday in Cambodia.
We got a tuk-tuk from Siem Reap at around 4:30am. It was dark, warm, and slightly surreal. By the time we arrived at the main gate, hundreds of other people had the same idea — but it never felt crowded because the complex is genuinely enormous.
The sunrise itself was cloudy the day we went. I won’t lie. The iconic mirror reflection photo didn’t quite happen. But the light that came after — golden, hazy, filtering through the stone — was honestly more beautiful than any photo I’d seen. It felt ancient and alive at the same time.
We spent the whole morning there and then moved on to Bayon Temple (the one with the giant stone faces) and Ta Prohm (the Tomb Raider temple where the trees have literally grown through the walls). By 11am the heat was intense — 35 degrees and humid — so we headed back, slept for two hours, and spent the afternoon floating in a pool eating mango.
Cost: £37 for a one-day pass. Tuk-tuk around £5 each way.
Would I do it again? A thousand times.
If you’re even considering Cambodia, put this at the top of the list. Not because everyone says to — because it genuinely earns it.
