I flew from Vientiane, Laos to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. I did not spend too much time in Cambodia - only about 5 days, and admittedly saw many of the top tourist sights before I moved on to other countries. Although it is possible to visit other places in Cambodia, I was only interested in a handful of places and chose to spend more time elsewhere.
Phnom Penh is a sprawling city with its center along the Mekong River. It is a monarchy and the palace is located there, along with several national monuments.
Around Phnom Penh:
Independence Monument Classic looking tuk tuks were everywhere
By night, there are several restaurants along the river. (Even the fancier restaurants had cheap food by US standards. $8 for 2 courses and a beer. Then again, the average Cambodian only makes $1-2 per day.) There were also many "girly bars" where pretty ladies would hang out waiting for men to chat with them and offer payment for their services. One pleasant surprise was a Boston-themed sports bar! As a Rhode Island native, I was thrilled to find the owner who was also from Rhode Island. He talked about his experience ending up in Cambodia and running the restaurant.
Cambodia has had a rough recent history. In the 1970's they were ruled by the Khmer Rouge, a communist outfit so radical and brutal that in less than 4 years in power, nearly a quarter of the entire country's population had died. The top sights in Phnom Penh are Tuol Sleng, a high school converted into a prison and torture center for the regime, and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, where political prisoners were brutally murdered and buried. (The regime didn't want to waste their limited supply of bullets on killing people.) As these two sights are extensively documented elsewhere on the internet, I won't spend too much time describing them. But they were both well worth a visit.
Tuol Sleng Killing fields Some victims on display
The Killing Fields are about 6 miles south of the city center, and after I left Tuol Sleng, a tuk tuk driver was hassling me to drive me down. I usually don't bother with anyone who solicits me, but I did want to go there and I negotiated with him for $12 he would take me and wait for me 1 hour while I visited the killing fields. I don't know if this was the best price, but honestly I could have spent at least 90 minutes inside (it's not a big site but there is quite a bit to see) and I felt a bit rushed because I knew that he was waiting for me. So if you're curious and into history as I am, you'll probably want a big longer than an hour at the Killing Fields.
Driving back to the city, my tuk tuk driver took many short cuts to quicken the trip, including driving the wrong way on a busy road. In SE Asia, road rules are purely optional.
Driving the wrong way down the street to bypass a traffic jam. No big deal.
Art deco market right by the bus station in Phnom Penh
I then took a bus to Siem Reap. We made a stop at a roadside rest area where they were selling fried tarantula! I wasn't brave enough to try it. There were also dozens of green lizards hanging out on a wall:
Siem Reap is a city near the famous Angkor Wat temple complex. This temple is so important that the Cambodians put it on their national flag. The center of Siem Reap is VERY touristy, it's basically a big party I didn't come for that, I came to see the temples, and set out on a rented bicycle to explore the temples that are spread out over several square miles. It cost about $62 for a 3-day pass, which is VERY expensive by SE Asian standards (considering a meal on the street is under $1 and you can get a hostel room with breakfast for about $5-6).
I took a ton of photos but since Angkor Wat is also well documented elsewhere on the internet, I won't post all of them. But I will show a handful of them, including when I saw the sun rise by Angkor Wat next to a crowd of people and then got to explore at dawn with a much smaller crowd. I also which the main sights drew in the crowds, smaller temples further away were much less crowded and I was able to explore more to myself.
There were many large stone temples with intricate carvings and endless passageways. One wall had a hidden passageway behind it, holding hundreds of carvings of apsaras, mythical female spirits. No two images were the same..
Click the photo on the left you can see the passageway on the left where these other apsara figures were found
One temple had large faces carved into it.
Another couple had trees growing out of the stone with their roots overtaking them! (Picture Lara Croft in Tomb Rader, or Indiana Jones.)
Riding a bicycle I had rented allowed me to stop and enjoy the sight of some water buffalo grazing near the temples:
After spending a couple days exploring the Angkor Wat temple complex, I went on a tour of Kampong Phluk, a town that floods for several months a year, so everything is built high on stilts. I was there in April when everything was dry so we were able to walk around and look up at all of the entrances that were 2-3 stories above our heads! There was also a woman following us with a bag full of school supplies hoping for us to purchase them "for the children"...it was clearly a scam.
Kampong Phluk, everything is built high on stilts. Processing dried shrimp....yummy!
The following day, I took a bus to the nearby border town of Poipet to cross via foot into Thailand. Like many countries, you have to formally "Exit" the country before you can "enter" another, but confusingly, the Exit customs in Cambodia is an office a couple blocks from the border crossing, and I completely missed it before realizing that I needed to find it before I could cross. The crossing is a bridge over an area that is mined so that people cannot cross outside of the official crossing.
Chaotic scene in the border town of Poipet