Angkor: When It Rains, You Score

And for the rest of our six-day stay, things stayed virtually perfect. It rained now and then, and the weather was often steamy. But there were three full days of pure, glorious, uninterrupted sun (which we suffered through by the hotel pool), and when the rains finally returned, they came as a welcome break. We'd go out in the early morning, explore a temple or two, and then retreat for the day.

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And as we soon discovered, that was the best way to take in Angkor: not in the standard two-day gulp, but one small bite at a time.

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"Templing can be exhausting," John McDermott, an American photographer who has settled near Angkor, told me one afternoon over lunch. "You're climbing up and down stone steps in the sun and trying to absorb hundreds of years of history. It's best to stretch it out over a week; spend a morning in the temples, skip a day, then go back the next afternoon. Otherwise you just get burnt out."

Fortunately, there's a lot to balance out trips to the ruins. Siem Reap is no longer the scruffy, can-we-leave-now backwater of a decade ago. It has turned into a vibrant town with a slew of five-star hotels, lively new bars and restaurants, high-end art galleries and any number of chic boutiques. For the energetic, there's golf, mountain biking or flying around in ultra-light airplanes. For the sybaritic, there are massages and exotic spa treatments. There are restaurants for the epicures, museums for the studious, orphanage tours for the empathetic, and even a classical cello concert every Saturday night.

So once we'd notched a couple of temples on our belt, we hired a tuk-tuk -- one of those motorcycle rickshaws you find all over Southeast Asia -- and set out to explore the town.

And that's when we discovered the other benefit of the rainy season. Siem Reap may be changing fast, but it still has a small-town feel, and with only a few other tourists around it was possible to take it in at a relaxed, small-town pace.

Reservations for restaurants and spas (critical during the high season) were never necessary, and the lazy, off-season ambiance made it easy to meet Cambodians, an extraordinarily friendly and open people. We would spend our evenings exploring the lively streets of the French Quarter, where surprises awaited us at every turn: huge, black deep-fried spiders (a Cambodian delicacy) from street stalls, delicately hand-tinted photographs at art galleries, elegant silks from tiny boutiques, massages from blind masseuses at the Seeing Hands Spa, even a net-covered garden bistro where thousands of butterflies fluttered around us as we ate. And it all felt as if we were nearly the first people to discover it.

Frankly, though, it was sometimes hard just to leave the hotel, and not only because of our innate laziness. Dozens of new luxe hotels have been built, varying from the blandly elegant Sofitel (with its own golf course outside town) to the sleek, sexy Amansara, built in 1962 as a guesthouse of then-Prince Sihanouk. The recently renovated Amansara is one of the most striking examples of modernist architecture in Asia. With off-season prices so ridiculously low, we tried several; our favorites were La Residence d'Angkor, an atmospheric place set on a quiet, leafy street near the river, and the amazing Hotel de la Paix, a cheerfully over-the-top art deco palace in the heart of town. With flaming sconces on the roof, hanging beds in the courtyard restaurant and Stolichnaya at the breakfast buffet, it's not for every taste. But we found it decadently luxurious, and my wife cried when we left. We both cried, a little.

In short, Angkor has grown up: It's no longer the gritty, suffer-for-culture experience it once was. In fact, it has become a luxury destination. But if you've been putting off seeing it, don't wait too long. The Cambodian government seems determined to push tourism to the breaking point and is busily cooking up a marathon, a golf tournament, a huge light show extravaganza at Angkor Wat and even an international tourism expo in the next few months. By December, the place will be inundated once again with visitors -- until the rains return in May and scare them away, making it safe once again to visit.

But the secret may be starting to get out. "We have guests who come in the dry season and say that they wouldn't recommend Angkor to their friends. There are just too many people at the temples. You can't see anything, and sometimes you can't even move," the manager of one luxury hotel told me. "So I tell them to come back in the rainy season, when everything is beautiful and you can drink it in. That's when you see Angkor at its best."

Stephen Brookes is an Alexandria-based writer who travels frequently to Asia.