Siem Reap is a small town with a very large reason to visit, and where you sleep in it changes the trip more than you’d expect. Stay on Pub Street and you’ll walk to every bar and tour desk but hear them until 2 am; stay on the temple road and you’ll...
Siem Reap has more good small hotels per square kilometre than almost any town in Southeast Asia. Decades of visitors to Angkor built a culture of garden hotels with pools, wooden Khmer houses and attentive service at prices that still startle people arriving from...
Lombok is Bali’s size with a tenth of the visitors, and its hotels are scattered accordingly: a surf town in the south, a 1990s resort strip in the west, hidden coves in the south-east, rice-terrace lodges under the volcano and the Gilis off the north-west tip....
The Gilis are three small islands off Lombok with no cars, no scooters and no hotel bigger than a village — which should make them boutique heaven. In practice the big names on Gili Trawangan run to 150 rooms, and the genuinely small places are easy to miss among the...
Seminyak is where Bali learned to be chic: the beach clubs, the restaurant street, the boutiques, the villa hotels behind high walls. It is also ten kilometres from the airport and, at rush hour, an hour and a half away. Choosing the right pocket of it is the...
