Where it sits
Kampong Cham sits on the Mekong about three hours north-east of Phnom Penh, and was for a long time the country’s third city. The riverfront is broad and unhurried, and the town is a pleasant, low-key stop on the way east or north.
What to see
The bamboo bridge to Koh Paen island is the local landmark — a hand-built structure laid across the Mekong each dry season and dismantled when the river rises. In the wet months a ferry runs instead.
Phnom Pros and Phnom Srei — Man Hill and Woman Hill — sit side by side outside town and carry a well-known folk story about a wager between the sexes over who would build the higher mound.
Wat Nokor is an unusual eleventh-century sandstone and laterite temple with a modern pagoda built inside its walls, which sounds like vandalism and works better than it should.
Practicalities
The province is an easy first stop out of the capital, and the road onward to Kratie and the north-east is straightforward.