Responsible travel, specifically

We do not book visits to residential care homes for children

This is the most important line on the page, because it is still sold openly in Cambodia and it is still framed as charity.

The pattern is well documented. Foreign visitors want to help, so an institution that can show them children receives donations. Institutions that receive donations expand. Research over the last decade has repeatedly found that a large majority of children in Cambodian residential care have at least one living parent, and that the number of such institutions rose alongside tourism rather than alongside need. The Cambodian government has been working for years to return children to families and reduce the number of these institutions.

The harm is not only structural. Children in these settings meet a stream of strangers who hold them, photograph them and leave, which is the opposite of what a child recovering from disruption needs, and it means unvetted adults have routine access to vulnerable children.

We do not book elephant riding, and we are careful about sanctuaries too

An adult elephant can carry a rider, and the reason a wild animal accepts one is a training process that is not gentle. That is the whole argument, and it does not need embellishment.

The second half is less discussed. 'Sanctuary' is not a protected word. Several places in Cambodia use it while offering bathing, feeding by tourists and photo sessions, all of which require the animal to be handled and controlled. A small number of projects, concentrated around Mondulkiri, work differently: the elephants live in forest, mostly out of reach, and visitors walk to observe them at a distance for part of a day.

We use only that second kind, we say clearly that you may not get close and may not get the photograph, and we would rather you were mildly disappointed by an afternoon than complicit in a decade of an animal's life.

Photography, which is where good intentions usually fail

• Ask before photographing a person, and accept a refusal without negotiating. A camera raised at a monk, a market seller or a child is a request, not an observation.
• Do not photograph children without a parent present, and do not post images of identifiable children.
• Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are places where people were murdered and where survivors and relatives still visit. Photograph the buildings, not yourself in front of them.
• At temples, the monks are working. Ordination ceremonies, alms rounds and prayer are not performances, and a long lens does not make watching them from six feet away less intrusive.

Temples: the rules that are actually enforced

• Shoulders and knees covered at Angkor Wat and required for the upper level of the central tower, where the dress code is checked and refused entry is normal.
• Do not climb on carvings, sit on balustrades or lean on lintels. The stone is soft sandstone and it is wearing measurably.
• Follow the marked routes at Angkor Wat, Bayon and Ta Prohm. They exist to spread wear and to keep 3,000 people a day off the same three staircases.
• Drones require permission at Angkor and flying one without it is a straightforward way to lose the drone.

None of this is onerous. It is worth stating because the single most common complaint we hear from Cambodian guides is that visitors treat a functioning religious site as a ruin.

Where the money goes, as far as we can tell you

On a typical trip, roughly 70 to 80 percent of what you pay us leaves our hands within days: to hotels, to guides, to drivers, to boat owners, to restaurants, to the Angkor ticket authority. Almost all of those are Cambodian businesses and all of them are paid in full and on time, which in a market with long payment chains is less common than it should be.

We are not going to claim a percentage donated to a project, because those numbers are usually theatre. What we will tell you, if you ask, is exactly which hotel, guide and boat operator your trip used and what each was paid.

Questions travellers ask most

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