Our bus arrived in Phnom Pehn a little after lunch time on Thursday 2 August. We walked to a nearby coffee shop to get our bearings and come up with a plan, and then emerged to get a tuk-tuk. Apparently most of the drivers are actually farm workers who come in from the country when there is not a lot of farm work, so a lot of them can't read maps and they don't know their way around the city. We experienced this first-hand when asked to get dropped at The Royal Palace (ie. the king's humungus palace, a major landmark) and instead we got dropped at The Royal Palace Hotel... <sigh/> :-/ Anyway, we finally managed to get to the backpacker area and settled on a hotel. We found a place just down the street to have dinner and then headed back to to bed.

Friday we were up early to do some sight-seeing. We walked past the Museum, the Royal Palace and a whole bunch of monuments and temples all the way down to the Russian Market. After a super cheap ($0.75!) local lunch we headed back towards the Genocide Museum. Its a pretty sad and sombre place - its been left exactly as the Vietnames soldiers found it when they liberated Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge in 1979. We had no idea that this kind of stuff was going on as recently as that - at least 17 000 people were imprisoned and tortured here with only 7 known survivors. It's good to get an idea though of what the Cambodian people have been through.

Afterwards, we decided to stop at the new Central Market on the way home. We managed to get a good price for a tuk-tuk which saved us the 45 minute walk :-) The market is huge and you can buy pretty much anything there. Unfortunately the shop assistants are so desperate for a sale that you can't even glance in the direction of their stall without them loudly calling at you and trying to tell you about EVERYTHING that they are selling. Definitely no concept of browsing here! We then walked home, had a shower and got a bit dressed up to go for cocktails at the Elephant Bar at Raffles Hotel, which we had heard about from a friend of ours in Germany. It is this fancy-pants old colonial-era hotel, kinda like the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, so we didn't quite feel we belonged but we enjoyed our drinks and the delicious free snacks all the same - nacho chips and salsa, wasabi coated nuts, peanuts and dried banana pieces... yum! Later we wandered back and had some dinner before collecting our laundry and heading back up to pack.

Saturday we woke up feeling pretty rough after a very disruptful night's sleep - some guests were arguing loudly right outside our room for half the night?! We had a quick breakfast down the street, bought some snacks for the bus and then just waited around for our bus to arrive to take us to our next stop, the laid-back seaside town of Sihanoukville.