If you made it through my entire first post about the Toul Sleng Genocide Memorial Museum and Killing Fields, I salute you. Thank you for taking the time to read it.
That said, my first day in Phnom Penh was not solely focused on the history of the Khmer Rouge. While those four years in the 1970s truly do color so much of modern Cambodia, the country as so much to offer, starting with the capital city.
I booked a tour for the first day, through Envoy Hostel, which was about 2km from my hostel. The tour started at 9am and your girl is NO FOOL, it’s a city, it was a weekday morning during rush hour, I knew traffic was going to be a problem. Soooo I was ready to go an hour before, so, yanno, 8am. I asked the desk at my office to grab me a tuktuk (it’s recommended to do it this way to avoid haggling issues), and they came back 10 minutes later and said “there are no tuktuks around, can you take a moto (motorbike)?”
Noooowwww I’ve always been warned not to use motos because… well… as you can imagine, they zip through traffic and if you get hit, you’re going to go flying.
Welp. I looked at the clock, realized if I said no, I’d never make the tour, shrugged, and hopped on. YOLO and all, right? I made it to Envoy Hostel 5 minutes before the tour was taking off. Pheeeew.
As I mentioned in this post, we first went to the Toul Sleng Genocide Memorial Museum and then the Killing Fields outside of the city. Definitely refer to the previous post if you’re interested, but for now I want to cover the other places we went.
After the morning’s education, we went to the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda plaza. I *highly* recommend going here and using one of the freelance guides. Our guide was fantastic and while the museum and pagoda would have been gorgeous if we had just roamed, our guide provided some fantastic background and information about everything we were seeing. One of my favorite tidbits that she shared was that the silver palace was, indeed, not colored silver on the outside, but instead has an interior floor and walls that are completely comprised of it. We also learned quite a bit about the King (essentially just a figurehead at this point), and about a lot of the traditions associated with the monarchy. Another of my favorites is admittedly a little silly as a choice but… for all of the royal ceremonies, there is a different color that is worn depending on the day of the week that the ceremony falls. I snapped a photo of the display example, DEFINITELY NOT BECAUSE THEY LOOKED LIKE SAILOR SCOUTS. DEFINITELY NOT.
Moving on…
We grabbed a super late lunch after this, and I had my first taste of amok, a traditional Cambodian amok, a pretty traditional dish with a curry-ish sauce, some protein or veg, and steamed in a banana leaf. I went for chicken and I thought it was pretty tasty, even though I had nothing else to compare it to as I’d never had it before. PSA: Amok is not spicy, so if you’re afraid of that, don’t be! Overall most Cambodian food is sweet/mild; the only thing I’ve had so far that was spicy was a papaya salad, which I *ordered* as such.
The final stop was the National Museum in Phnom Penh. To be honest, I wouldn’t recommend doing this last unless you REALLY love artifacts/ancient art. I bought the audio tour for $2 USD but my brain was really saturated already with everything from the rest of the day that I mostly just wandered around listening to the traditional music tracks that were offered on the guide.
And that was the end of the tour! Our tuktuk brought us back to Envoy and I ended up chatting with one of the employees. He offered to take me and one of the other guys from the tour out for dinner and through the old slum district.
We said yes. Of course.
Our newly appointed guide gave us an hour to nap, hydrate, and charge our phones before we set off on foot into the city again. This time he walked us through a ton of local food carts/stalls, before settling on one for fried noodles with shrimp. For $1.50 we were STUFFED. I aaaaabsolutely recommend Cambodian food carts and have and will continue to patronize them for the rest of my trip.
The final adventure for the day was learning the history of the slum district. TL;DR, after the genocide was over, a LOT of people needed assistance. The temple in the center of the city took in so many of the poor, that they had to throw together housing outside of the temple itself, turning the entire surrounding few blocks into essentially the “poor district.” People began to run businesses out of their homes, selling anything from homemade food to cans of beer. This practice continues into today, and our guide chatted with us as we walked, explaining how lots of the people who live here work as guides or in the service industry during the day, and in the evening come home and continue their home-stalls for additional income.
When we finished walking around, our guide used PassApp to call a tuktuk for me to zip back to my hostel where I walked in, took a quick shower, and and promptly PASSED OUT.
End Day 1
