We stayed three nights in Phnom Penh, wanting to explore the city and also make sure we could get the bikes boxed up and ready for our flight home.
The hotel we stayed at (The Pavilion) was a like an oasis filled with palms and greenery, offering two lovely pools, an attentive staff and a good but simple restaurant. We didn’t plan a lot of things to do while there, knowing little about the city and wanting to have some quiet time. We needed some chill time before going home, knowing that this was the end of this chapter of our long trip. Kind of hard to believe.
I wanted to get my hair cut before heading home, making Cambodia the fifth different country in a row that I’ve had my hair cut. I found a barber close to the hotel that cost $3, which was the least expensive of all the past 5 haircuts by a long shot!
One place we wanted to see was the Killing Fields, whose official name is the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center. Choeung Ek is the site of a former orchard and mass grave of victims of the Khmer Rouge – killed between 1975 and 1979 – in Dangkao Section, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, about 17 kilometres south of the Phnom Penh city center. Some young Dutch people that are staying at our hotel said it was a moving experience, and so that tipped us towards going. We didn’t expect it to be pleasant, but we both thought that it’s good to get a reminder about how bad things can get when the wrong people get into power. It’s worth a visit, for sure.
All our clothes are worn from the continued use along the way, in NZ, Vietnam and Cambodia, especially our cycling clothes. We didn’t have many clothes, and so we wore the same things over and over again. And we cycled about 5,000 km (3,000 miles) total and so our cycling clothes are pretty bleached from all the time in the sun. The sun was intense enough that we both got tans through our shirts. You can see the sun damage on Chris’ skirt below. It was bought new just before we left, but the southern hemisphere’s sun bleached it out substantially. I took only one pair of cycling shorts and they developed a hole in the seat so they landed in the trash in Phnom Penh before we left.
Chris wanted to do some shopping before we went back home, so we went to the central market to look around. The central market offers what seems like hundreds of stalls with identical looking clothing, plus display areas of jewelry, pots, and pans, hairdressers, tailors and all manner of goods both useful and frivolous. There are also areas that sell fruits and vegetables, seafood, grains, spices and other foods.
We walked around the area surrounding our hotel, visiting parks, crowded streets, and along the river. In the evenings we walked, or took a tuk-tuk to restaurants.
Our last day we hung out at the hotel until about 9 PM. Our flight was not until just before midnight, and so at 9:00 we loaded the bike boxes into a taxi and got driven to the airport.
The airport at Phnom Penh is not huge, and only passengers can go in the airport building at all. The entire front wall of the airport is made of glass, and so the families and friends of those traveling crowd around the front of the airport to be able to see their loved ones until they go through security. We pushed the trolley with the bike boxes through the crowd to get into the terminal, checked in and then went to find our flight. As we were going up the escalator, everyone outside waved at us as if they knew us. A lovely last memory of Phnom Penh.
Leave a Reply