Royal Independence Gardens

This guide walks the smallest public park in Siem Reap, where badminton games and picnics fill a strip of lawn that once hosted a quieter kind of gathering. It follows King Norodom Sihanouk and General Lon Nol meeting here in the 1950s to plan Cambodia's break from French colonial rule, the campaign that gave the gardens their formal name. Along the short loop you'll pass a shrine, a fountain, and hundreds of fruit bats roosting overhead until dusk. Stick around for early evening, when the bats lift off together over the same ground where the country's independence was worked out.