Travelogue: Phnom Penh, Cambodia

In the past few days I have been out of Pakistan traveling to Cambodia and Malaysia. In the due course I have visited four cities and hope to do a small travelogue about the city and my observations and pictures to boost.

Cambodia for many may very well me an odd place to head off for a trip, that too right in the middle of Ramadan, but I was on invitation to attend the 8th Informal Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Seminar on Human Rights to be held in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

My travel itinerary had me spending over seven hours in Phnom Reap before my local 55 min flight to Siem Reap. Hoping to make good use of the time I decided to take a tour of the city and the only way possible was to negotiate with the taxi drivers, I naturally vary of taxi drivers trying to rip you off from airports tried by best to come up with a decent bargain landing a tour for US$25 for the tour of the city and be dropped off back at the airport just in time for our connecting flight. later on I realized, to my disappointment, that 25 bucks were too high and the better bargain price would have been close to 12-15 bucks, lets chalk one more down for the taxi drivers.

Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia. Its city still undergoing lots of development poverty seems to be wide spread and the streets a little dirty with absolute no traffic sense. In my drive I barely saw 5-6 traffic lights and intersections were usually a free-for-all, with the prevalent concept bigger car has the right of way, and driving on the opposite side, was quite normal, I sat watching my taxi driver do it with such great agility that I even for a Pakistani driver I was impressed, the confidence was such that he could actually ‘out wit’ on coming traffic to veer of the street.

The main sights in town include Wat Phnom from where one could have a great view of the city, the Silver Pagoda in the Royal Palace complex, where you can see the emerald Buddha and a Buddha made of solid gold. The National Museum is also worth a visit. Other sights include the Phnom Temple, the Orchid Garden, the central market and a 15th-century pagoda or you can take a boat ride on the Mekong River to see the floating villages and a crocodile farm.

We were not much interested in visiting any tourist spots but limited our adventure to visiting some selective shopping areas in this small town, which also included a drive down the riverfront where interestingly we found the flag of Pakistan whirling on the river front main street. The entire strip had practically all flags of all nations proudly displayed and naturally I could not hold back the urge to snap a few pictures recording the event

Phnom Penh is a small city and a one hour drive had us across the length and breath of the Cambodian capital. It was hot and sunny but in an attempt to spend a little time we reverted to some window shopping which was entertaining. The most important thing w noted was the fact that everyone preferred to use the US Dollar with no mention of the Cambodian Riel. Which only came into play if you were being offered change for anything less then a dollar.

Phnom Penh is a beautiful city but not much of a tourist attraction, it has generally been used as a stepping stone for tourist who prefer to head over to Siem Reap to visit the Angor Wat. The four odd hours were enough for a city tour which could have been more then enough had we decided to our the Royal Temple or the National Museum, both I am told are beautiful destinations.

Travelogues to soon follow: Siem Reap, Cambodia; Langkawi, Malaysia & Kuala Lampur, Malaysia