Phnom Penh

- February 04, 2020

Phnom Penh certainly lives up to its reputation as Cambodia's busy capital. The traffic (especially during peak rush hours) is a circus of large SUVs and trucks making up their own lanes on the road, while tuk-tuks and motorbikes swarm all around. Give-way rules seem to be a matter of who starts crossing an intersection first. I will say though that this makes for quite an exciting experience in the back of a tuk-tuk, not too sure about getting on a motorbike yet. The roads themselves (inside the city) are mostly looked after, excluding the piles of rubbish on the footpath which can spill out on to the street. Outside of the city is another matter entirely...

I'm writing this as we leave Phnom Penh on a 4 hour van ride to Kampot on Cambodia's southern coast. The roads which happen to be paved could be described as more pot-hole than road, and as we reach the highway outside of the city it appears to be largely still under construction, alternating between sealed tarmac and dirt/gravel every few hundred metres (at some points only a quarter of the lanes were sealed). But the cherry on top is prevalence of risky overtaking manouvers, making this a rather tense journey. But I suppose its as good as any intruduction to road travel throuought Asia.

So what did I get up to during my short stay in Phnom Penh? The first day started with a tour around the Royal Palace grounds and accompanying temples.

Afterwards we took a good look through the National Museum of Cambodia, which mainly focused on older Khmer art and artifacts, including a stone tablet with the first known graphical representation of 'zero'. But one thing I wasn't expecting to see was the Cambodian Goodwill Moon Rock, one of the 135 gifted by Nixon in 1973.

Third row, fifth character

The second day took a much more sombre tone, as we visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (formerly a secondary school, it was taken over by the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975 to be used as a detention, interrogation, torture and execution hub, known to them as S-21).

The follow up to this was to visit the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center a.k.a The Killing Fields (at least one of many throuought Cambodia) where many of the prisoners from S-21 were taken to be executed and buried in mass graves.

To finish up the day on a more peaceful note, we went for a walk to the centre of the city and saw the Independence Monument, which memorialized Cambodia independence from the French in 1953.

Then caught a tuk-tuk to Wat Phnom and had a good walk around there.

Finally a stroll through the Night Market, a quick dinner, and then along the riverfront to see where the Tonlé Sap river (along which most of Phnom Penh is built) meets the Mekong river.