phnom penh

This weekend I went back to Phnom Penh briefly to revisit the city. I had passed through in 2006 and hadn't been particularly impressed. In fact, I'd say I left the city with a pretty negative view of it. Dusty, hot, dirty, full of dirty old men with questionable intentions - it really hadn't seemed like a place to visit. I flew in from Bangkok Friday afternoon and Amity joined me from Siem Reap later that day.

This time I opted to get a slightly nicer hotel so that we would have a pleasant place to retreat if things hadn't changed a whole lot. Fortunately, despite the sweltering heat, things felt quite different this time around. There were more people out and about, it felt a bit cleaner and more orderly, and we stayed away from most of the expat bars where I'd previously come across the aforementioned seedy characters.

Over the weekend, we hit most of the main sites in town - visiting the royal palace, the national museum, Wat Phnom, and the genocide museum, which, other than the genocide museum, I had skipped last time (unclear why I did that). The palace was very stately, and with far fewer tourists than its counterpart in Bangkok, far more enjoyable to walk around. The museum too, was very well put together and had a ton of very well preserved and presented Khmer artifacts. The building itself was also a beautiful dark red and had a great little courtyard inside - very nice. The genocide museum remains about as bleak of a museum as you'll ever go to, and left both Amity and I with the same uneasy feeling when we stepped back out the main door. Nevertheless, we topped off both days with some very tasty food - something else that I somehow didn't run across last time - and a fair number of tasty cocktails at the Foreign Correspondents Club and other bars along the riverfront. And so overall we both really enjoyed visiting the city and I'll certainly have a very different opinion of it going forward. Perhaps not somewhere I'd recommend spending an entire week... but for a couple days, it's a great place to swing through.

Now South East Asia is behind me and I'm in Japan for the last stop of the trip. Adam, Russ and Pierre will join me tomorrow for the beginning of what will likely be two pretty ridiculous weeks of fun. Tokyo, Hiroshima and three days of skiing in Hokkaido! Going out with a bang :)