Phnom Penh, 30 April

Why do airports have to become shopping malls? Cafes, bars, newsagents and bookshop/newsagents I can understand, but the avenues of shops selling jewellery, alcohol, clothing and watches are just a hindrance to anyone with a plane to catch.

From where we got off the high speed KLIA Ekspress at KLIA2 (the budget KL terminal) today to actually arriving at the departure gate took a good 40 minutes to walk - and that's with the  help of the moving footways.  All the way we are besieged with shops selling things I don't want. Plus of course, there's the extra time to budget in for bag-drop, immigration, customs, security etc.

The flight from KL to Phnom Penh is less than two hours - but I don't remember any of it - I slept all the way. Or rather, dozed, as one does in a plane.

Landing in Phnom Penh started out much the same as it did 11 years ago.  Getting a visa on arrival meant your application had to be handled by no less than six bureaucrats sitting in a row behind a bench. Your passport and paperwork all  solemnly handed from one to the next, each one adding their own little mark, before reaching the money man, who after we passed over $US30 each, handed back our passports, now carrying a very picturesque Cambodian visa.

There the resemblance to 2004 ended.  Once outside and on the drive into town, my eyes were opened as I gawked around at everything new - and that was everything!  Back then, the city was a struggling, low-rise town, with poverty everywhere and streets in the CBD still unpaved and minus drainage.

Now, it's a thriving, bustling city, thronged with people and shops and street traders, including a few new highrise buildings - albeit with still some dodgy electrical work to be seen along the way (see photos below). 

Unlike 10 years ago, the tourist trade must be booming.  Restaurants and hotels, mostly small scale, are everywhere. We're staying at a small hotel owned by another rally driver whom Dave met when they were both competing in last year's Sydney to London endurance event.  Hilary's Boutique Hotel, as it's called, It lives up to its "boutique" name - an intimate comfortable refuge just metres from a bustling thoroughfare. It will be our HQ for the next couple of days....

The itinerary for our visit to Cambodia is taking into account things that we saw last time, and don't really need to see again - things like the Royal Palace, which, while striking and certainly worth a visit, has not changed at all.

Another must-see for everyone is the former high school and now  the Genocide museum, Tuol Sleng,  known only as “S-21” where thousands of Khmers were tortured and killed by their countrymen, followers of Pol Pot in the regime of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s.  It is so distressing and emotional that I don't think I can bring myself to go back there, or to the site of one of the actual Killing Fields, a little further out of Phnom Penh. 

Our impressions of these places at that time can be seen here

So this time, we will content ourselves with seeing what we missed last time...

Next: the National Museum and silk weaving

below: some of the new wave of high-rise buildings, with the old-style power supplies still to be seen everywhere.

At a monument to the now dead monarch, King Norodom Sihanouk

The courtyard at Hilary's Boutique Hotel

A footpath stall selling organic products - not a common sight

 

above: a ghostly vision of the historic temple, Wat Phnom, which led to the founding of the city which bears it name.