Siem Reap - Phnom Penh
To go to Phnom Penh from Siem Reap we had two options, the bus or the boat. A few years ago the boat was the only way to go to Phnom Penh via the Tonle Sap lake and river but now that there is a sealed road from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh it is quicker and cheaper to travel by bus. To buy our bus tickets we checked a few agencies in town and found out that many of them used the excuse of the Khmer New Year (buses are full, prices are higher) to give us expensive prices. We finally managed to get a ticket with Sorya for $6 each. However even if usually passengers get picked up at their hotel for free it was not possible for us as it was the Khmer New Year and too many people were travelling.
Our bus left Siem Reap at 8am and we arrived just on time to catch it as we had hard times finding a tuk-tuk willing to take us to the bus station for a reasonable price. We got one at the end for $2. The trip to Phnom Penh was 6h long and the bus quite comfortable. We stopped two times on the way at "bus stops" where passengers could buy some food. At one of those stops there were cows wandering around the buses and going around the tables where people were eating to try to get some food (see picture)! At another stop we were surprised to see on sale, next to the grilled crickets, huge grilled spiders (see picture)! All the way there was a lot of traffic on the road (trucks overloaded with people, motorcycles, bicycles) and also cows crossing now and then. The landscapes where very flat and were mainly rice fields. In Phnom Penh the bus dropped us at the Central Market from where we walked to the Boeng Kak Lake, the budget travellers area. On the "lake side", this is how the tuk-tuk drivers refer to this area, there are plenty of guesthouses offering various prices and level of comfort. The lake itself is quite nice and is covered with vegetation.
Phnom Penh
What a busy town, motorcycles everywhere with most of the time 3 to 4 people squeezed on them, trucks overloaded with luggage and people, brand new jeeps, all finding their way on the very busy streets. We did spend a lot of time just observing and taking photographs off this unceasing, lively and often surprising traffic.
There are a few buildings to see in Phnom Penh. We passed a few times next to the Wat Phnom and liked the busy atmosphere in the garden around it. Cambodians come to relax and there are also some monkeys wandering around. We did not feel like visiting the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda as those buildings are very similar to the temples we had seen in Thailand. There is also the Independence monument to check out, preferably at night when it is nicely light up.
The Central Market and the Russian Market are interesting places to explore. Both are massive markets where the tourists mix with the locals within the narrow alleys surrounded by stalls selling souvenirs, food (the smell of the fishes and raw meat is quite strong!), spare parts of motorcycles, clothes, home appliances...well a lot of different things.
It is its particular atmosphere, that made us really like Phnom Penh. Kids are playing on the sidewalks, whenever there is some space, as most of the time sidewalks are occupied by parked cars and parked motorcycles. There are people in charge of managing those "parking lots", they make sure the cars and motorcycles are all lined up to park as many vehicles as possible. Some streets are very dirty with piles of rubbish on the sidewalk, some others are pretty clean but always the sidewalk is packed with food stalls, motorcycles and cars, so pedestrians have to walk on the street! Even if it is very tiring to wander in town due to heat we really enjoyed it. Phnom Penh is a capital but has a human size. With some efforts most of the sights can be discovered by foot and there are, mainly along the river, comfortable coffee places and restaurants to recover when needed. However for those who want to be lazy there are tuk-tuks and motorcycles everywhere... sometimes we have been offered a tuk-tuk 10 times within 20 meters! We have noticed that most of the drivers are polite and smiley..."a tuk-tuk lady?" but they are not always willing to offer honest prices to tourists, $1 is the minimum price we managed to obtain for a short ride in town. Motorbikes are cheaper, 2000 riels for a short ride, but must of the times the drivers did not understand where we wanted to go.
As in Siem Reap there are a lot of kids begging in the streets or selling copied books. It is very sad to see all those kids by themselves at night but giving them money is not a solution. It is better to support the NGOs who aim to send those kids to school and also help the parents to get jobs. Many of those NGOs run restaurants in Phnom Penh where the kids can get experience before getting jobs in other restaurants in town. We had a very good meal at the restaurant of the NGO Friends.
Being both born in 1979 we did not know much about the Khmer Rouge before we came to Cambodia. In Siem Reap most of the books sold by the kids in the streets are about the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge government between 1975 and 1979. We started reading more about the subject and discovered the tragedy that Cambodians went through. In Phnom Penh two memorials have been set up after the Khmer Rouge were defeated by the Vietnamese in 1979. In town there is Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, it was an ex-school transformed into a prison where the Khmer Rouge tortured thousand of people. It is now a museum, cells can be visited and expositions show hundreds of pictures of prisoners. Boards explain what has happened during the Khmer Rouge regime and also relate the personal stories of prisoners and Khmer Rouge soldiers. The visit was heartbreaking but very instructive, for a good 2h30 we had an insight of the horrors committed by the Khmer Rouge. This visit can be combined with the visit of Choeung Ek extermination camp, also known as the Killing Fields (15km outside of Phom Penh), a place where the prisoners of Tuol Sleng where sent to be killed. We found Choeung Ek less impressive than S-21 as there is no building remaining on the site. A memorial containing thousand of skulls found in the mass graves has been built and there are a few boards explaining the brutal methods used by the soldiers to kill the prisoners without wasting any bullets. To visit both sites we got a tuk-tuk and after negotiations paid $11, also each site has an entrance fee of $2.
Our bus left Siem Reap at 8am and we arrived just on time to catch it as we had hard times finding a tuk-tuk willing to take us to the bus station for a reasonable price. We got one at the end for $2. The trip to Phnom Penh was 6h long and the bus quite comfortable. We stopped two times on the way at "bus stops" where passengers could buy some food. At one of those stops there were cows wandering around the buses and going around the tables where people were eating to try to get some food (see picture)! At another stop we were surprised to see on sale, next to the grilled crickets, huge grilled spiders (see picture)! All the way there was a lot of traffic on the road (trucks overloaded with people, motorcycles, bicycles) and also cows crossing now and then. The landscapes where very flat and were mainly rice fields. In Phnom Penh the bus dropped us at the Central Market from where we walked to the Boeng Kak Lake, the budget travellers area. On the "lake side", this is how the tuk-tuk drivers refer to this area, there are plenty of guesthouses offering various prices and level of comfort. The lake itself is quite nice and is covered with vegetation.
Phnom Penh
What a busy town, motorcycles everywhere with most of the time 3 to 4 people squeezed on them, trucks overloaded with luggage and people, brand new jeeps, all finding their way on the very busy streets. We did spend a lot of time just observing and taking photographs off this unceasing, lively and often surprising traffic.
There are a few buildings to see in Phnom Penh. We passed a few times next to the Wat Phnom and liked the busy atmosphere in the garden around it. Cambodians come to relax and there are also some monkeys wandering around. We did not feel like visiting the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda as those buildings are very similar to the temples we had seen in Thailand. There is also the Independence monument to check out, preferably at night when it is nicely light up.
The Central Market and the Russian Market are interesting places to explore. Both are massive markets where the tourists mix with the locals within the narrow alleys surrounded by stalls selling souvenirs, food (the smell of the fishes and raw meat is quite strong!), spare parts of motorcycles, clothes, home appliances...well a lot of different things.
It is its particular atmosphere, that made us really like Phnom Penh. Kids are playing on the sidewalks, whenever there is some space, as most of the time sidewalks are occupied by parked cars and parked motorcycles. There are people in charge of managing those "parking lots", they make sure the cars and motorcycles are all lined up to park as many vehicles as possible. Some streets are very dirty with piles of rubbish on the sidewalk, some others are pretty clean but always the sidewalk is packed with food stalls, motorcycles and cars, so pedestrians have to walk on the street! Even if it is very tiring to wander in town due to heat we really enjoyed it. Phnom Penh is a capital but has a human size. With some efforts most of the sights can be discovered by foot and there are, mainly along the river, comfortable coffee places and restaurants to recover when needed. However for those who want to be lazy there are tuk-tuks and motorcycles everywhere... sometimes we have been offered a tuk-tuk 10 times within 20 meters! We have noticed that most of the drivers are polite and smiley..."a tuk-tuk lady?" but they are not always willing to offer honest prices to tourists, $1 is the minimum price we managed to obtain for a short ride in town. Motorbikes are cheaper, 2000 riels for a short ride, but must of the times the drivers did not understand where we wanted to go.
As in Siem Reap there are a lot of kids begging in the streets or selling copied books. It is very sad to see all those kids by themselves at night but giving them money is not a solution. It is better to support the NGOs who aim to send those kids to school and also help the parents to get jobs. Many of those NGOs run restaurants in Phnom Penh where the kids can get experience before getting jobs in other restaurants in town. We had a very good meal at the restaurant of the NGO Friends.
Being both born in 1979 we did not know much about the Khmer Rouge before we came to Cambodia. In Siem Reap most of the books sold by the kids in the streets are about the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge government between 1975 and 1979. We started reading more about the subject and discovered the tragedy that Cambodians went through. In Phnom Penh two memorials have been set up after the Khmer Rouge were defeated by the Vietnamese in 1979. In town there is Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, it was an ex-school transformed into a prison where the Khmer Rouge tortured thousand of people. It is now a museum, cells can be visited and expositions show hundreds of pictures of prisoners. Boards explain what has happened during the Khmer Rouge regime and also relate the personal stories of prisoners and Khmer Rouge soldiers. The visit was heartbreaking but very instructive, for a good 2h30 we had an insight of the horrors committed by the Khmer Rouge. This visit can be combined with the visit of Choeung Ek extermination camp, also known as the Killing Fields (15km outside of Phom Penh), a place where the prisoners of Tuol Sleng where sent to be killed. We found Choeung Ek less impressive than S-21 as there is no building remaining on the site. A memorial containing thousand of skulls found in the mass graves has been built and there are a few boards explaining the brutal methods used by the soldiers to kill the prisoners without wasting any bullets. To visit both sites we got a tuk-tuk and after negotiations paid $11, also each site has an entrance fee of $2.
Two days will have been enough time to visit Phnom Penh, 1 day for site seeing and 1 day for relaxing. However we ended up staying much longer, in total 5 days and an half, 3 days and an half to visit and relax... and 2 extra days to fix a "technical incident". We had copied our photos from Angkor and the Tonle Sap Lake onto our hard drive and deleted them from our camera memory card. On what we thought will be our last day in Phnom Penh, we added more photos to the hard drive and realised that all the pictures we had copied a few days ago were gone... 2500 pictures lost! After the initial panic, we did some research on the Internet and found out that pictures deleted from a memory card can be recovered. We spent the next day downloading free recovery softwares from the Internet but none of them worked. We were getting very fustrated but we got some distraction as at one stage our Internet cafe got transformed into a temple! Family members, neighbours and 2 monks worshiped for a good hour in the middle of the Internet cafe. Customers have not been asked to leave, it was a very strange situation. Not being able to fix the problem on our own, the next morning we went to the biggest photoshop in town and a very nice young guy solved our problem for $5. With his recovery software he managed to retrieve all the deleted pictures that had not been overwritten by new pictures. Happy day!
