Our hotel choice for Phnom Penh was an odd one. We stayed in the Orrusey hotel, which is located over a very busy, smelly and dirty market. During the day you can access the hotel through the market, but at night when the market is closed the only way in or out was via the car park ramp. The room itself was OK, a good size, clean and with a window (not something every room in the hotel has). It also had a gym and a spa, which we both made full use of during our stay. The safety deposit box in the room however didn't work and there were no spare ones to replace it with, and the wifi signal was so poor we had to sit out in the corridor if we needed to send any emails, such as the one we needed to send to our hotel in Siem Reap to confirm our arrival time once we booked our ferry.
There is not a great deal to see in Phnom Penh, it is very small for a capital city. The traffic however is as bad as any larger Asian city, with motorbikes and tuk-tuks jostling for space. There are no pedestrian crossings on any of the roads, well none that work, and so crossing the road is a challenge, normally solved by keeping your wits about you and walking across at a steady pace allowing the traffic to move around you. The road network is based on a New York style grid, with the roads being numbered instead of named, this theoretically makes it easy to navigate. I emphasise the word theoretically, although the streets are numbered, they are not necessarily numbered consecutively.
We had quite a busy first day in Phnom Penh, first we bought our ferry ticket to Siem Reap, then we headed up to Wat Phnom, a temple on a small hill at the northern end of the city. It is rumored that a girl named Penh found 4 Buddha statues floating in the river and a shrine to her is located around the back of the temple (The statue is of Penh and not a Buddha in drag as B first thought). We then walked down to the independence monument and up passed the Cambodian-Vietnamese friendship monument on our way back to the royal palace. Within the royal palace is a building referred to as the silver pagoda, which I had read was so named due to the silver tiles, which I assumed were on the roof. I was therefore disappointed to see the building had the same red, blue and green roof of all the other buildings in the complex. It turned out the silver tiles make up the floor not the roof.
That night we went to one of the bars in town called the blue chili bar, which had a drag show on a Friday night. One of the drag acts looked a lot like one if B's nephews which made us laugh. We even managed to make friends with a local man, who we met again for lunch the next day. Somehow making friends in a city instantly makes that city more likable, and the problems with the traffic and crossing the road suddenly seem a lot less significant.
On our last full day we explored the national museum, a collection of sculptures from around Cambodia, a lot of which came from Angkor. It is not a big museum, but it is jamb packed, and has a nice shady courtyard you can sit in. The evening came before we knew it and so we never had time to go to the killing fields, which every Tuk-tuk driver we passed was so keen to take us to, or the prison museum where photos of all Pol Pot's victims line the walls. Instead we took a walk in a random direction and ended up at the Olympic stadium. We took a walk along the top of the stands as the sun was setting, it was nice and breezy, and people were playing various sports throughout the grounds, from football to volleyball. We stayed there a while before finally heading back to our hotel, we needed an early night to catch our 7:30 ferry the next day.
We got a tuk-tuk to the pier the next morning, and arrived stupidly early, so that we were the first on the boat. Now what can I say about the boat other than it certainly did 't look like the picture we were shown when we were convinced a $35 boat ride would be better than a $10 bus. As more and more people arrived we recognised the same look of shocked disappointment on their faces as that saw the boat for the first time. We got talking to a Spanish couple from Bilboa, who had been travelling up the Mekong from Vietnam, and although this wasn't the best boat of their trip, they assured us it wasn't the worst. The journey took nearly 6 hours up the Tonle Sap river, passed floating villages and flooded trees, then on into the Tonle Sap lake, the largest freshwater lake in south east Asia. It really was big, and if it wasn't for the occasional clump of pond weed it would have felt like we were in the sea. When we arrived at the other end we were met by a barrage of Tuk-tuk drivers with signs, but none had our name on it. It seemed the hotel in Siem Reap never received our emails. Luckily we were allowed to use the phone in the cafe at the pier to give the hotel a call, and they sent someone out to pick us up. Over an hour later.
Adam
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