Exploring Cambodia: Phnom Penh and Siem Reap

Phnom Penh

We returned to Phnom Penh after our few days of relaxation in Kampot just in time to meet up with our friend, Giannis, who flew from New York to spend two weeks with us in Cambodia. After so long with just the two of us, it was a welcome change to have a third person to adventure with for a while! [Editor’s note: Allow me to translate that for you – she was getting super tired of me and desperately needed someone else to talk to. Can’t blame her in the slightest.] We spent two and a half days in the city before heading to Siem Reap, and I think that was about the right amount of time. Phnom Penh is a nice small city, and while we certainly didn’t explore all of it, we left feeling like we hit the major sites we wanted to see, and got a bit of time to wander around and experience the area. We even managed to fit in a fancy cocktail bar (something that Giannis and I liked to do back in New York City, so we thought it would be fun to see the Cambodian equivalent)!

The view from our hostel room in Phnom Penh

The first day we walked from our hostel to the Royal Palace, which was only about a 5 minute walk away from the main backpacker area we were staying in. [Editor’s note: I was deathly ill with the rehashed remnants of my earlier Chinese plague, so I stayed in our hostel room on my deathbed while Giannis and Jess explored this place.]I hadn’t realized that the Palace grounds follow the same rules as temples as far as covering up, and as I was wearing shorts I was forced to buy some (very stylish) $3 pants that extended below my knees in order to enter. The Palace has quite a few buildings, including an ornate throne room and perhaps the most famous, the Silver Pagoda (which is not silver, but the floor is made up of real silver tiles that apparently weigh over a kilogram each). Most of the floor was covered in heavy rugs, since tourists are allowed to enter, but a portion was blocked off and revealed for view. There are also hundreds of Buddha statues of various shapes and sizes in the Silver Pagoda which were mostly gifts to the King, the centerpiece of which is a large gold standing Buddha encrusted with diamonds and jewels. Overall the Palace was interesting, with beautiful architecture, but we didn’t want to pay for a guide to show us around and there were no signs, so we didn’t feel as though we really got any historical or cultural significance from the experience.

One of the buildings in the Palace complex.

Giannis in front of one of the pagodas at the Palace.

A carved naga, or multi-headed snake, which were everywhere and super cool.

After the Palace, we were met with a surprise torrential downpour where we were completely stranded just across the road from our hotel as we watched the street flood in front of us (thankfully in a bar/restaurant that had cold cheap beer and a pool table). [Editor’s note: The water in the streets was almost up to people’s knees, though this didn’t stop an outdoor barber from continuing his haircuts/shaves – he just squeezed under an umbrella and kept cutting. Pretty great. Fortunately, the water dissipated super quickly once the rain ended.]

A monk passes by in the downpour as the street begins to flood.

The following day, we decided to pair up the two sad but important sites in Phnom Penh from recent history, the S-21 Prison and Genocide Museum, and the Killing Fields, both from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. We joined up with Christian, another backpacker we’d met in Kampot, and the 4 of us rented a tuk-tuk for the day to take us to the sites. We started at the Genocide Museum at the site of the S-21 Prison, a former school turned torture center for anyone suspected of anti-Khmer Rouge sentiment (or pretty much anything at all). It is a horrifying and depressing place, and we got a guide to show us around. She, like many of the guides there, had personal experience to tell from the Khmer Rouge era, and told us of how she had to flee to Vietnam as a small girl, and about the several family members she had lost in the genocide. While her English wasn’t great, which made it tough to understand everything she was saying, the personal side added to the solemnity of the experience. Between the terrible sites and the oppressive heat and humidity, it was a tough few hours.

Part of S-21, the school-turned-prison and torture camp.

We headed next to the Killing Fields about a half hour outside the city, the site where (as you probably guessed from the name), prisoners were taken to be executed by the Khmer Rouge. This also is a chilling and terrible place, though the location itself is quite beautiful now, a jarring contrast. There’s an excellent audio tour that contains descriptions as well as firsthand accounts, and is included with admission. There are shallow pits where mass graves sit, and even today new bone fragments and bits of fabric can be seen in and around them. [Editor’s note: It really was quite a horrific scene. We learned that the soldiers would make prisoners dig a grave and kneel at the edge, at which point the soldier would strike them at the base of their skull to knock them into the grave (to save bullets). In case that blow didn’t snap their spine and kill them, the soldiers would then cover the victims in the mass grave with DDT and then bury them alive. They also had a “Killing Tree,” which is a massive tree against which soldiers would smash newborns to death while their mothers watched. Just incredibly sad stuff.] The quality of the audio tour makes the Killing Fields an important must-do for me in Cambodia, though it certainly isn’t easy to hear about the atrocities committed so recently in our collective history.

One of the mass graves, now covered and with colorful bracelets left in memory by visitors.

Needing a lighter evening to compensate for the day’s activities, we decided to try the Elephant Bar located in one of the oldest and fanciest hotels in the entire city – the Raffles Royal Hotel. [Editor’s note: Jackie Kennedy Onassis actually used to stay and drink there in the 1960’s and she even came up with a cocktail that now appears on their menu. So again, quite fancy.] We’d read that the cocktails there are expensive (as in New York cocktail prices) but that their happy hour is good and the décor excellent. Giannis and I (and occasionally Rorie) would go for fancy cocktails in NYC fairly often with a small group of friends, so we knew we had to replicate the experience at least once on our trip. The bar was very nice, and the cocktails interesting if not quite up to our (admittedly snobby) standards. For me, it was the first time indulging in something so fancy since beginning the trip [Editor’s note: Not quite accurate. Remember her super fancy duck dinner in Beijing? I don’t because I was sick at that time, but I heard about it.], so it was a fun exception to the traveling rule for me. [Editor’s note: Given that we rolled up in grungy backpacking clothes with flip flops, we were semi-surprised that they let us into such a fancy hotel.]

Me and Giannis with our fancy cocktails at the Elephant Bar.

The final morning, we had a few hours to spare before catching our bus to Siem Reap, so we went shopping at Central Market, a huge and partially enclosed market filled to the brim with everything you could imagine – hundreds of stalls of tourist clothing, t-shirts, and the ever-present “elephant pants”, but also jewelry, electronics, wood carvings, other souvenirs, and a section for food as well. Not knowing what the prices would be like in Siem Reap (I needn’t have worried), I went sliiiiightly nuts and stocked up on some gifts for myself and others. As befits our personalities, Rorie wandered off and looked at lots of things but didn’t buy any of it, and Giannis spent the entire time searching for the smallest, most local, authentic food stalls he could find. [Editor’s note: Given that I had to end up carrying all of the crap that Jess bought anyway, it’s good that I didn’t feel terribly interested in shopping anyway. Thank god that most items only cost a couple bucks each.]

Inside Central Market, a cavernous and almost Grand Central-like structure.

Our shopping complete, we got on a several-hour bus to Siem Reap, the town that serves as a jumping-off point for Angkor Wat.

Siem Reap

The city of Siem Reap (as distinct from the actual temples of Angkor Wat) is a small city that appears almost entirely based around tourism to the temples. It was a contrast from Phnom Penh, which had lots of hotels, restaurants, and bars for tourists, but is first and foremost a Cambodian city for Cambodians. Siem Reap, on the other hand, was nearly entirely made up of a spectrum of budget to high-end hotels, restaurants, bars, spas, and shops all catering to foreigners. As distasteful as that may sound, however, the city managed to retain quite a lot of friendly, laid-back charm and I was surprised at how much I liked it there. I thought it would be just a place to sleep in between temple visits, but I can see why so many expats end up settling there for good.

Beyond the temples, we did several other things in and around Siem Reap that are worth noting here. First, this was the first experience for Rorie and Giannis in the world of spa treatments, which are ridiculously cheap and available all over town. Both men had their first pedicures (approximately $5 USD each), full body massage ($8), and even a “fish massage”, where small fish eat dead skin off of your submerged feet for as long as you can stand it ($2, with a free beer). I should put on the record that both Rorie and I (despite ticklish feet) really enjoyed the fish massage, while Giannis struggled to keep his feet in the water more than a few seconds. [Editor’s note: Jess and I spent the whole time calmly with our feet in the water sipping our beers, while Giannis spent it squealing with his feet on the edge of the water because he found it too ticklish. Pretty amusing.] The boys were great sports about all of this, I was delighted they wanted to try everything, and can I even go so far as to say that Rorie may now be converted to the benefits of certain pampering treatments? [Editor’s note: You can go this far, Jess. Within reason. I’m a believer in the fish massage. They spent 45 minutes eating all the dead skin off my feet, which made them feel incredibly soft afterwards. The other stuff was comparatively meh, but I love the fish.]

Rorie could not *be* any cooler while fish nibble at his feet.

Working through the tickles for the sake of soft skin.

We also took a break from temples and did a day-long excursion out to a “floating” village – Kompong Phluk – in the nearby Tonle Sap Lake. Technically the village isn’t floating, as all the houses and buildings are on tall stilts, but they are all far out in the middle of the water and everyone moves from house to house by boat. We took a boat through the village to see it, too, passing houses as well as a school building. Then we visited a flooded forest, an area of mangroves that is completely flooded for most of the year except during the end of the dry season. For this part, we switched to small canoes that were paddled by women from the village while we relaxed and enjoyed the fascinating scenery of the flooded trees. We ate lunch on a floating platform that also housed a crocodile farm (selling dishes made from crocodile meat in the restaurant, as well as fancy handbags and shoes made from the skin and small taxidermy figurines in one of the oddest combination shops I’ve ever seen). We returned from the floating village to the docks by laying on the nose of a wooden boat while it sped down one of the inlets – very relaxing and delightful. [Editor’s note: The floating village really was pretty cool. Often these types of excursions are contrived, perhaps rooted in a historical way of living but now only sustained in order to take tourist money. However, this one was far more authentic and legitimately insightful than those, since people still live there as a community and function accordingly. I highly recommend this as one of the best things we did in all of Cambodia.]