First Time In Cambodia
Hope you liked my last post on the Scooter Food Tour in Vietnam. The next country after Vietnam for my four country tour was Cambodia which originally wasn’t even in the plans but I decided to include it since I figure I would already be in the region and it’s next to both Vietnam and Thailand which I’m visiting anyway. Of course as I predicted, the main attraction in Cambodia would be Angkor Wat near Siem Reap but I decided to spend two nights in the capital city Phnom Penh as well. Angkor Wat requires a separate article on its own which will be the next post after this one. We’ll start here with a few interesting things I saw in Phnom Penh.
Phnom Penh Traffic Worse Than Ho Chi Minh City
If you thought the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City was bad enough (from the videos I captured), Phnom Penh was actually worse! Not only did we have cars, trucks and motorbikes, Phnom Penh is also big on tuk tuks which were available through Grab (the equivalent of Uber in the region) right from the airport into town. From my observations, the women here drive just as aggressively as the men on motorbikes and I think helmet use was a bit lower than in Vietnam too.
Throughout my trips on tuk tuks, I saw motorbikes weave in and out all around us and they came so close I could easily reach out and touch them. A few times I saw groups of motorbikes with both male and female drivers go up right onto sidewalks in order to try and get past heavy traffic on the roads. They would then cut out back onto the road in front of us as shown in the video below. I thought these incidents were just hilarious as they left no space for pedestrians on the sidewalks.
Much like in Vietnam, I saw entire families on single motorbikes here in Cambodia including this family of four where both parents had a toddler sitting in front of them while nobody had helmets on. This was captured in the same video below.
Wat Phnom & Bats Tree
After I settled into my hotel, I did walk to a temple on a hill called Wat Phnom which offered a tranquil place in the city. In my opinion, Wat Phnom was not as spectacular as some of the Thai temples from a tourist point of view but it was still a nice to find such a peaceful location as a nice break from the busy city streets.
Across the street from Wat Phnom was a very peculiar sight to see. It’s a large tree right in the city where during the daytime, several thousand flying brown fox fruit bats hang upside down. At night, they all fly off to hunt and then return back to this same tree.
I shot some video of the riverfront in Phnom Penh and quite honestly I found that the night time here looked better than the daytime. I saw a few bags of garbage float by during the daytime in the river and in some spots around the city, I saw garbage piled up.
Along the waterfront was the Royal Palace. I didn’t go inside but did take some video of the outside which looked quite nice but again, I think I much prefer the Grand Palace in Bangkok.
Overall, I wasn’t overly impressed by Phnom Penh as I found it a bit too dumpy although the Cambodian food was quite nice. Two nights was more than enough as I looked forward to the next destination still within Cambodia which would be Siem Reap, where the Angkor Wat temples are. Angkor Wat is by far the primary tourist attraction in Cambodia and it’s actually right on the country’s national flag too. So it will be no surprise that my highlight for my Cambodia visit will be Angkor Wat as shown in the next article post.
