We arrived in Phnom penh in the afternoon after having taken the super mekong express bus from Siem Reap. Our first choice for accommodation was staying at the lake for a couple of reasons one of the big ones being it was fairly cheap. We soon discovered that it is not really a great place to stay if you want to see much of the city but it is really good if you just want to lie in a hammock and smoke joints all day. We spent a couple of nights there, watched the sunset over the lake and watched a couple of films but could not handle it any more as we actually wanted to do something.
There are lots of rumours that the lake is not going to be there for much longer as it has been sold off to some big foreign company and will be filled in. No body seems to know exactually what is going on but at least we have seen it, what there is to see is a bit smelly and dirty but it is nice to sit by in the evening on one of the big creaking verrandah areas.
After moving from the lake we saw a lot more. We found a guesthouse just near the river and the royal palace and so could walk to most places we wanted. We spent a week in phnom penh all together taking our time to see the main tourist sites and to wander around and see what was going on in the city.
We visited the royal palace and saw the silver pagoda and the emerald buddha, most of the solid silver floor tiles are covered up with carpet and sellotape, but the ones that you could see gave us a good idea of what the whole area must have once looked like. The rest of the palace complex was also pretty impressive with nice garden areas, everything is pretty well maintained except for some painted wall murals which may or may not be in the process of restoration, you could not really tell. Next to the palace is the national museum which is a nice building with a central courtyard around which many angkor age relics are placed. I am not sure either of us were really interested in the pieces that much but the setting was nice and having seen angkor wat we could get a better idea about what they would have looked like in there original setting.
We also visited the Toul Sleng museum or S-21 as it is also known. This is the former school in phnom penh where many prisoners of all ages were imprisoned and tortured. It was a moving site, walking around the cells which had been occupied when the khymer rouge fell and when any prisoners that were alive were freed. There are photos of how the victims were left in the cell they were found in. It was an unsettling upsetting feeling which only continued as we walked passed the thousands of photographs of those who were imprisoned in S-21 from young children to the elderly, then seeing the torture equipment and some of the skulls. All in all incredibly disturbing but it certainly helps to remind people who visit of the attrocities committed so it hopefully does not happen again.
We also visited the killing fields at Chou ek which were also very moving. Seeing the memorial stupa filled with more than 8000 skulls of victims so far discovered, there is no more room in this one either! The site is actually very pretty, with a lot of trees and flowers an birds, it had been a chinese cemetary before the khymer rouge acquired the land. This makes it even more disturbing and unbelievable to think of what happened here. Walking around you are stepping on fragments of bone and pieces of cloth from the clothes of the victims. The guide said there are other mass graves as yet uncovered. After we left and got in the tuk tuk to head back to town still thinking about the horror of where we had just been the driver asked us quite cheerily if we wanted to go to the shooting ranges! We did find this quite shocking although we have heard of a lot of people doing it, the timing though seemed pretty inappropriate.
We both really liked phnom penh and i think we could have stayed longer and despite all i have heard and read i did not seem to notice all the sleeze that is known to go on. Maybe we were lucky not to witness it or maybe we just did not see it, either way it seemed like an ok place. There are such a lot expats is the city either running bars or just sitting around. Maybe this has something to do with the sleezy side or maybe not.
We also went to the 2 main markets although we did not buy a lot except a pair of cheap ear phones that lasted less than a day at central market and some jewelry at the oven-like russian market. We did have a good walk around and saw all sorts of things, i think you could buy anything you could think of. The big yellow central market was a little easier and more comfortable to get around unlike the low ceilinged metal tin can like russian market. It was another time when i have thought it would have been nice to be able to take lots of stuff home but can't.
