Phnom Penh

Sorry for the delay in posts, we've had a couple of hectic days.

We arrived in Phnom Penh yesterday afternoon. The bus ride down from Siem Reap was pleasant enough -- about as pleasant as a six-hour bus ride can be, I guess. The countryside doesn't change much during the trip, it's mainly rice paddies and sugar palms the whole way.

Our arrival in Phnom Penh was ... uh, a little less than auspicious. It started out well enough -- our guest house sent a van to pick us up at the bus station -- but once we arrived at the guest house things took a turn for the worse. The woman running the place told us there were no open rooms, but that her cousin's place around the corner had open rooms. The girl who had taken our reservation claimed that people were supposed to have been leaving that day, but missed their bus. Of course that only accounted for two rooms, not the three we'd requested.

They convinced us to get back into the van to ride around the corner (or down the skeevy alley, then around the corner as it turned out) to the Royal Hiness (sic) Hotel. Phil, Brad and I ran in and poked are heads into a couple rooms, which looked good enough at a glance. How wrong we were. After checking in (and paying for the first night in advance), we started to notice some issues. First off were the bathrooms -- each one had it's own unique issue. In ours, the room's air conditioner drained its condensation straight onto the floor, meaning the floor in their was wet and ripe.

On the way out to dinner, we noticed an older Westerner (didn't get the accent to well, he was either British or Aussie) playing pool in the lobby with a much younger Cambodian woman. About the same time we noticed the odd couple we started noticing other things -- the flier in the lobby/bar advertising the "Roaring Temple" (a concoction of vodka, fruit punch, RedBull and Viagra) and the hotels posted rules that banned prostitution, but allowed guests to bring "visitors" to their rooms for $20. At this point we decided it would be best to bail. Unfortunately, since we paid for one night, and the folks behind the counter weren't about to relinquish our first night's cash, we had to stick it out for the night. First thing this morning though, we found a nicer place nearby that was more than willing to extract us from Her Hiness.

We spent the rest of the morning at National Museum and intend to visit the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda after lunch. I'll try to post later today with some pictures.

Enjoy.