Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh. The most homely-feeling capital city that I have ever visited. The food has many of the delicious options of Thai cuisine, but also includes a wonderful slant of its own, a lime-and-peanut infused Khmer slant to well-known Thai recipes. Two novel specialities included Khmer curry, a yellow curry with a unique blend of galangal and Chilli, and Amok; a local dish made from a lemongrass-based curry paste.


We took a slow boat tour along the Mekong delta to get to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The tour included a visit to a crocodile farm, saw how rice paper and coconut lollies were made, and visited a Cham village, which is the muslim minority in Vietnam. Apart from the rice-paper making, the trip was not particularly interesting, although the slow boat turned into a fast boat, so we got to Phnom Penh in record time. The trip was no comparison to the lovely meandering slow-boat journey to Luang Prabang from Thailand.
The day after our arrival, we decided to go and visit the Killing fields. As an important part of Cambodia's recent history, I thought it would be a necessity in order to understand the current shape of the country, as well as humanity, in general. What I found was shocking – stories of mass killings of bound and blindfolded civilians using rudimentary implements like sugar cane machetes and garden hoes, and a 'killing tree' used to kill children. Although I have heard stories about Pol Pot's regime back at home, the in-your-face reality of what happened left a much larger impression.


After finding an Indonesian restaurant, where I had a huge bowl of delicious Gado Gado (steamed vegetables with peanut sauce) for 2 AUD, the next stop was the national museum, which housed many ancient Khmer artefacts. It's so much more interesting to walk through a museum housing items that are thousands of years old, instead of the limited history housed within the walls of an Australian museum. The visit to the museum only whet my appetite for what was coming next, a visit to Siem Reap and the magnificent Temples of Angkor.