Everything in Kampong Thom orients itself around the highway and the river, and where those two cross, the town does its business. The Arunras hotel and guesthouse function as the unofficial bus terminal — Mekong Express tickets are sold at the front desk, moto-dop drivers idle on the corner, and if you make the mistake of telling one where you are sleeping, he will be parked outside your door at dawn. A roundabout nearby carries a statue of an elephant fighting two tigers — civic sculpture that makes perfect sense after a day in the province and none at all before. In the evening a small night market unfolds in front of the market hall. The best Khmer food in town is served behind the Arunras, where there is no English menu and none spoken, and the room fills with locals anyway. The whole place can be crossed on foot in a quarter of an hour, which is roughly the amount of time most visitors give it.

Six hundred metres west of the main bridge, on the southern bank of the Stung Sen, stands a French colonial villa that the province has never quite decided what to do with. The furnishings are long gone. A few bathroom fixtures survive, stranded in rooms that no longer have any other purpose, and the building gives off the particular melancholy of a house that outlived the administration it was built to impress. The gate is sometimes open, the door sometimes unlocked, but neither matters much, because the bats roost in three big mahoganies along the eastern edge of the grounds and the best view is from the road outside. Arrive thirty minutes before dusk and you can watch the colony wake up in stages — restlessness first, then noise, then the departure, all of it timed to a light that no one taught them to read.

The seasonally flooded grasslands and rice fields ringing Kampong Thom look, to an untrained eye, like nothing at all: flat, brown for half the year, unremarkable. They are among the most important bird habitats in Southeast Asia. This is core range for the Bengal florican, a bustard listed as Critically Endangered, with fewer than a thousand individuals estimated alive worldwide as of 2017. Males stand about 55 centimetres tall and display from March to May, launching themselves above the grass with a deep humming call. Their problem is arithmetic: the same dry-season grassland that they need for breeding is the same land that converts most easily to dry-season rice. Around the edges you may also find adjutants, pelicans and painted storks drifting up from the Tonle Sap floodplain, wintering warblers and buntings out of Siberia, and, in March, flocks of Oriental Plover passing through. The best way in is a moto-dop driver who knows the tracks around Rolous village, five kilometres toward Phnom Penh.

An hour by tuk-tuk through villages and rice paddies brings you to Sambor Prei Kuk, and it is worth understanding what you are looking at before you arrive. This was Isanapura, the royal capital established by King Isanavarman I of Chenla, who reigned from roughly 616 to 637 — two full centuries before Angkor was founded. The temples are brick and sandstone rather than the grey stone of the later Khmer empire, and they are scattered in three groups across about a thousand acres of shady forest: some 150 sanctuaries, most of them ruined, along with octagonal towers, lingams, reservoirs and stone lions. UNESCO inscribed the site on 8 July 2017. The forest hides more recent history too. American aircraft bombed positions inside the complex in the early 1970s, leaving craters among the prasats, and mines left behind by fighters in the same period were not cleared until 2008. Anyone expecting Angkor will be disappointed; anyone who understands they are standing in the capital that came first usually is not.

The Stung Sen also offers an exit. A boat leaves most mornings around ten from beneath the big bridge, bound for Phat Sanday, a large floating village 80 to 90 kilometres downstream at the river's mouth on the Tonle Sap. Northward, moto-taxi drivers will spot you stepping off the bus and offer a three-to-four-day ride to Preah Vihear, sleeping in villages along the way, calling at Preah Khan Kompong Thom and Koh Ker, and running stretches of an old Angkorian road across bridges that have carried traffic for eight hundred years. The riding is hard: sand, stones, bamboo, the occasional forded stream. It is also the clearest reminder that Kampong Thom is not really a place between two other places. It is the place the roads to everywhere else start from.