Siem Reap has colonial and Chinese-style architecture in the Old French Quarter and around the Old Market. In the city, there are museums, traditional Apsara dance performances, a Cambodian cultural village, souvenir and handicraft shops, silk farms, rice paddies in the countryside, fishing villages, and a bird sanctuary near the Tonle Sap Lake and a vibrant, cosmopolitan drinking and dining scene. Siem Reap today—being a popular tourist destination—has many hotels, resorts, restaurants, and businesses closely related to tourism. This is much owed to its proximity to the Angkor temples, the most popular tourist attraction in Cambodia. Cycle Vietnam and Cambodia. Siem Reap was little more than a village when French explorers such as Henri Mouhot "re-discovered" Angkor in the 19th century. However, European visitors had visited the temple ruins much earlier, including António da Madalena in 1586". In 1901, the École française d'Extrême-Orient ('French School of the Far East') began a long association with Angkor by funding an expedition into Siam to the Bayon. The EFEO took responsibility for clearing and restoring the whole site. In the same year, the first Western tourists arrived in Angkor, a total of about 200 in just three months. Angkor had been "rescued" from the jungle and was assuming its place in the modern world. Grand Hotel d'Angkor, built in the mid-1920s. With the acquisition of Angkor by the French in 1907 following a Franco-Siamese treaty, Siem Reap began to grow. The Grand Hotel d'Angkor opened in 1929, and the temples of Angkor became one of Asia's leading draws until the late-1960s when civil war kept tourists away. In 1975, the population of Siem Reap, like all other Cambodian cities and towns, was driven into the countryside by the communist Khmer Rouge. Siem Reap's recent history is colored by the horror of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Since Pol Pot died in 1998, relative stability and rejuvenated tourist industry have revived the city and province. Bike Shops in Saigon