Phnom Penh

We sent off from Phnom Penh port in the morning into the inner city on Cyclos. I’d never been on one of these before and it was quite a weird experience but I enjoyed it. The driving throughout Cambodia had been quite shocking but this was a whole new level. The streets in this city are literally lawless, there’s no traffic coordination, everyone just tries to go forward without considering others around them and pretty much all you can see is a wave of motorbikes going around cars and toot toots. Crossroads are just pure chaos because everyone is trying to get across the same time and I saw about 20 extremely close situations where motorbikes avoided crashing into another vehicle or someone on the street at the very last second. Although being on a cyclo your literally hanging off the front of a bike and motorbikes come within about an inch of you, the chaos was actually quite fun in the end. We first stopped at the royal palace and national museum (which was basically just stolen artefacts from Angkor Wat) before heading to the city’s first pagoda.
In the afternoon we started by going to the Killing fields just outside the city. I don’t really know what to say about this as the whole experience was just quite eerie (as you would expect) and I think it’s just something that you acknowledge and respect, but is obviously not an enjoyable experience. We then went to the genocide museum at the remaining prison in the city. This was really harrowing as there are pictures of the victims (men, women and children) everywhere and it’s crazy to think that these little 5 year old kids could have been the subjects of something as awful as that. Despite it being unpleasant, it was still interesting to learn about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and also meet some former child victims of the regime.
In the evening we watched a classic Cambodian dance routine (the way the girls hands curl is so cool to see) and puppet show before heading to the city’s night market (got some more elephant pants…) and then just asked a toot toot driver to take us to a lively street. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we ended up on the street where the all the strip clubs are lmao.Läs mer