Advertisement
Published: March 17th 2009
Edit Blog Post
The next logical destination after Siem Reap was obviously Phnom Penh, the capital and largest city of Cambodia. Although I personally liked Khmer food which consists of curries, stir fried vegetables, rice, noodles and soups a lot, my stomach strongly disagreed with me, and we were not only avoiding the street food but also eating in pretty good places. Did not make any difference. During our staying in Cambodia (almost a week) the food was pretty much a problem for me ( and also for Anniina later on...)
The buss trip from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh was surprisingly short, only four hours! Whole the traveling thing was kindly organized by our No Problem hotel in Siem Reap, and cost almost nothing. Luckily the bus was cozy and comfortable, otherwise I would have felt even more worse when we arrived to PP.
They say that Phnom Penh was once known as the "Pearl of Asia". Nowadays the city seemed to be everything else than that. It smelled so bad, and we were staying in a seaside area, near the river! To be honest the weather was also hot and humid (which is it year-round) but with a bad stomach
the 35 celsius degrees was more than enough for me.
Once again, our hotel, Royal Guesthouse was a good choice and I still wonder how on earth we had a such great luck with our accommodation choices. Some other couples even followed us by tuk tuk from the bus station to stay in the same place. During the first evening we just wandered around the city and didn't do that much since our great friend Eija was supposed to come to the city next day to visit together with us in those nightmare tourist attractions from which PP is so famous for.
The two big tourist attractions in Phnom Penh concerned the atrocities of the totalitarian communist Khmer Rouge regime: The Killing Fields of Cheoung Ek, where genocide victims were slaughtered by the thousands, and the Toul Sleng Museum (S- 21), a high school-turned-prison which became the largest center of torture in the country. Visits to these important sites seemed at first a stark contrast to the life-in-the-fast-lane mayhem of the city; later it became clear that the catastrophes in Cambodia's recent history were precisely the reason for the lawlessness and disorder today. Those things even happened just
a few years ago on a timescale from 1975 to 1979! Compared e.g. WWI and WWI this felt like it could have happened like yesterday. I was in shock to see those places and read that at least 200,000 people were executed by the Khmer Rouge.
Afterwards I am glad that we visited in those places, although I felt so depressed, sad and somehow empty. Definitely not my place at all, but I tried to took it as a learning experience which explained the country's state a bit more. An evening before our visit we also watched a movie in our hotel which was telling about Killing Fields. It opened the history a bit more.
Altogether we spent three nights in PP, which was absolutely enough to see the important places. Eija decided to head next to the Sihanoukville ( which is one beach destination in Cambodia) but we, instead of that continued our journey to Vietnam. I felt relieved when our buss picked us up from the hotel. In the buss we made friends with two British gentlemen, James and Tom, who were heading to Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) as well. At the Cambodia- Vietnam
border we also met Anthony so suddenly we had five of us travelling together to the Ho Chi Minh City.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.085s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 53; dbt: 0.0526s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb