James and Jo’s south east Asia adventure

We’d been told by our waiter at breakfast the previous day that the Royal Palace should be visited and the morning would be the best time as there is a sort of festival, Pchum Ben, that takes place over 15 days and affects which areas of the palace grounds can be visited in the afternoon for. As it happened the weather in the morning was great but there was a downpour all afternoon so it doubly made sense to go in the morning.

Our hotel was immediately opposite the Palace so it was literally a two minute walk to the entrance. However in that time we were still able to be accosted by a tuk tuk driver, a “Mr Phen”, who had a laminated list of places to visit around Phnom Penh that he was offering to take us to. Suggesting we could see a couple of these other sites first and then he’d take us back to the palace, we said we wanted to see the palace first but might see him later, which we would…

We went into the palace and opted for a tour guide when offered, this was definitely a good decision as they provided heaps of information and knowledge and as there weren’t really any plaques displaying information we would have been quite ignorant of any details otherwise. The buildings in the palace complex are stunning and the amount of golden idols is breathtaking. The centrepiece was a 90kg solid gold Buddha with diamond inserts. Having queued up to view the Scottish and English Crown Jewels in the last couple of years I would say that what was on display here was even more impressive. Photos are now banned within this area apparently to limit public/global knowledge of the riches on display. There seemed to be almost no security in this area either.

One of the buildings in the silver pagoda complex had a fresco depicting the Ramayana (a Sanskrit epic) painted in 1903 that must have been over a hundred metres long.

After finishing our tour around the palace and having a look ourselves we grabbed a drink to cool down the headed for the exit. Mr Phen was sat down by the exit and had presumably been there for the entire time that we had been in the palace complex (c. 1.5 hours). He clearly had designs on being our personal driver, we had decided not to go to any of the main tourist sites but would go to the central market for the right price. He started with a relatively high quote for a round trip and said that he would wait for us there and drive us back. We got frustrated with this interaction and so ended up just crossing the road into the hotel. To be honest we were both happy to have a bit of a relax after a hot morning. We were lying by the pool when the rain came just before 3 (especially annoying as that’s when happy hour was due to start!) and didn’t let up for the whole afternoon. It was a good choice to do the palace in the morning and we felt confined to the hotel given the weather, our only real period of prolonged bad weather. We watched ‘first they killed my father’ on Netflix, a film directed by Angelina Jolie about the Cambodian genocide. 

We ate dinner at the hotel restaurant for the first time, I had a roasted barramundi that came with a rich beef gravy, a bit weird but still tasted fine; and Jo had a ‘spaghetti’ carbonara that turned out to be a penne carbonara – safe to say that pasta was not their forte.