Cambodia and Thailand - October, 2005                     Asia Trip Home Page   Phnom Penh After about five hours on a pretty decent bus we found ourselves deposited in the middle of Phnom Penh.  A short taxi ride later, we checked into our very nice hotel, the Bougainvillier.  Located right on Sisowath Quay, the main drag on the Tonlé Sap river, our hotel was probably our best accommodation of the trip.  This proved to be a good thing as we spent more time in our hotel room here than normal, due to a combination of the heat and street pressure from tuk-tuk and moto drivers, and beggars.  The hotel is French-owned, quite intimate with only 14 rooms, with a very nice restaurant sharing the lobby at street level. Here is the hotel's web site:  http://www.bougainvillierhotel.com We spent the balance of our travel day in Phnom Penh, plus 2 more full days.  It was plenty because the heat (there's the heat complaint again) simply did us in.  If we had the trip to do over again we would do it in December or January when the weather is more tolerable.  We opted for October because we have done all of our overseas trips in October and had good luck.  It tends to be the shoulder season in many places, doesn't intrude on our holidays, precedes Susie's annual November show at Artique, doesn't conflict with our summer fun and just generally is a good time for us to travel.  However, in this case, even though the winter months are high season in Thailand and Cambodia, we would put up with the extra folks and higher rates to escape some of the heat.  End of heat rant. If you are still plodding through this material you have figured out that we found Cambodia fascinating, and Phnom Penh is the heart of Cambodia.  The capital and largest city, it includes some of the requisite tourist stops - lovely wats, National Museum, Royal Palace, all of which we saw.  It also has some great open air markets where we did some shopping.  But the real attraction was on the streets, simply experiencing life here.  It is very foreign, very active, a little intimidating and inherently interesting.  For us, the appeal of Phnom Penh isn't found in the marquee attractions.  It is the waterfront and the city itself. We also continued our practice of eating well.  The Tonlé Sap River and the lake of the same name, as well as the Mekong, are rich fisheries.  We learned in Siem Reap that seafood in Cambodia is outstanding.  We ate the national dish, fish amok, three times, and enjoyed a nice variety of other Cambodian fish dishes as well.  And yes, during the trip we did have the occasional, shall we call it, digestive disruption?  However, these occasional problems didn't keep us from our mission of sightseeing and eating our way through southeast Asia.  A little Immodium and Cipro usually got us back on the road. On our last day in Phnom Penh we visited the Tuol Sleng museum.  It is essentially a holocaust museum from the terror regime of the Khmer Rouge.  17,000 people were housed on the grounds of this former school.  Only 7 are believed to have survived.  We knew it was going to be a difficult place to visit and it was.  The visit consists of watching a movie, walking through cells and viewing photos of most of the victims as they were checked in to the place.  Why go?  Good question.  It is certainly not your garden variety tourist attraction.  It is there, we think, because visitors to Cambodia are aware of the recent terror and death.  As a visitor, you can't simply walk around seeing the sites with no acknowledgment of this horrifying history.  So maybe a visit to Toul Sleng is part of that acknowledgment. Anyway, here a few photos from Phnom Penh:            Go to photos