Ms Akim Ly is the founder and director of Adventures Cambodia, a women-owned private tour company in Siem Reap, Cambodia. She grew up inside Angkor Wat, where her grandfather Loung Sake served as Grand Abbot of the Angkor complex, and she founded the company in 2013.
Akim was born during the Pol Pot regime, a time when schools across Cambodia had been shut down. Her grandfather, Loung Sake, was the Grand Abbot of the Angkor complex, and it was inside the walls of Angkor Wat that she lived and received her education, an arrangement that was as unusual as it was formative.
Girls were not allowed to live in pagodas. To stay, Akim shaved her head and pretended to be a boy. Under her grandfather's guidance, the monks educated her in Pali scriptures written on palm leaves, and she practised prayers and rites alongside them.
Despite the hardship of the era, Akim recalls this time with warmth. The statue of the Preserver God Vishnu at the entrance of Angkor Wat became a figure she could talk to and always rely on. When the rainy season came, the pools atop Angkor Wat filled with water, and she spent her leisure time swimming there, a childhood playground unlike any other in the world.
After five years, she could no longer keep up the disguise. Schools had slowly become available again, though far away in town. Up at four in the morning, Akim covered the seven kilometres to school, some days by bicycle, other days running barefoot in clothes still wet from washing, and went through five grades in two years.
She did not learn Angkor from a guidebook. She lived in it.
When Akim left the pagoda to live with her mother, food was not available every day. She left school and found work, first as a cleaner in a restaurant, then running the business for the owner. By 16, she had saved enough to open her own restaurant directly opposite Angkor Wat, a location that deepened her connection to the temple complex and to the travellers who came to see it.
She then spent 15 years abroad, first in Europe, then 13 years in Vietnam, building a career as a businesswoman. But the pull of home never faded.
In 2013 she came home to Siem Reap.
In 2013, Akim returned to Siem Reap and founded Adventures Cambodia. Having grown up inside the temples, she understood Angkor in a way that few guides could: not just as a historical site, but as a place where she had lived, prayed, and played.
She built the company around a simple idea: every tour should be private, personal, and led by someone who genuinely knows the land. Adventures Cambodia began with classic Vespa tours and has since expanded to vintage Jeep tours, electric mountain bike tours, food tours, and multi-day holiday packages.
Akim and Adventures Cambodia in the press
