Phnom Penh Day 2

Monday Oct 4, 2004

It was noisy at Bill’s place by 5am, including a rooster that sounded approximately 6 feet away. Some close neighbors were chopping wood and one was apparently hammering on some rock. At least the tuk tuk’s and motos are muffled here, unlike Bangkok . I mentioned to Bill that evidently nobody complained to the police about noisy neighbors, and he laughed and said nobody complained to the police about anything. If you involve the police evidently they just extort you for money.

The smell of wood smoke was strong, 40% of Cambodians do their cooking over wood fires.

The typical doorway is a little shorter in Cambodia :

Ryan in a doorway.

We had breakfast at a nearby French restaurant, then went and saw Bill’s office. They have a full-time guard for $70 per month, which is pretty amazing. The crime rate in Phnom Penh is about the same as Washington state. so relatively high but not compared to what I’m used to.

I hired a moto driver (another Pheap ) for the entire day, he drove me around and waited outside each place I went. First I went to the Russian Market. I didn’t see any Russians there, I forget why it’s called that. There I bought a couple Rolex watches, “not made in China, made in Hong Kong!”, in other words genuine fake Rolexes, not the imitation fake Rolexes from China. I also bought a DVD that they claimed wasn’t a video-taping from a cinema, but I didn’t know what else it could be, and turned out it was.

Part of the Russian market. Phnom Penh traffic.

The traffic was amazing for its chaos. Here’s a video of part of it.

The Royal Palace in Phnom Penh . The Royal Palace in Phnom Penh .

Royal Palace .

One interesting thing was that the Buddha poses mean something different in Cambodia vs Thailand, and my guide was very nationalistic about how the poses were originally defined in Cambodia and then propagated to Thailand where they were changed. The Cambodians and Thais don’t have a great relationship, and have historically been enemies, fighting over territory for a long time.

Just as my Royal Palace tour ended, a huge rainstorm moved in. That’s the hardest rain I’ve ever seen, here’s a video. It lasted about 20 minutes or so I think. Aterwards many of the streets were flooded, including the one right outside the Royal Palace . Pheap had to do a few u-turns to avoid streets flooded too deep to ride through.

The street outside the Royal Palace . Another flooded street.

Next I went down to the waterfront to walk around. It’s a nice waterfront.

The Phnom Penh waterfront. Phnom Penh Tonle Sap waterfront.

And then across the bridge and over to see the Mekong river waterfront. I didn’t see any other tourists over there. I was hungry so I bought a package of dried Jack-fruit from a kid there, and liked it enough to get a couple more to bring home to share with family.

The Mekong river.

Pheap getting gas at a hi-tech gas station, the norm is a table with a bunch of old plastic 2-liter bottles full of gas on it.

That night Bill and I had planned to have pizza, so I dropped by a grocery store and bought some Heineken. It was about the same price as in the US , so it’s a luxury item there. The pizza was tasty, though it has some traditional Kmer spices on it that I’m not used to. I ate so much I could hardly get out of bed in the morning.