The ferry into PP is an experience on its own. There are about 15 ferry’s, 2 of which are roro and the others are drive on reverse off ferries. No probs for a tandem or the millions of mopeds but there’s a single concrete ramp leading down into the water at each port and the ferries push and shove to dock right next to each other anywhere they can on this ramp.
Cars and moped then fight to get past the other cars and mopeds trying to board outgoing ferries and men wave batons and blow whistles to try to control it all. It’s great fun to watch and we walked Tilly off the ferry and up the ramp so we didn’t have to navigate all the chaos.
We’d been advised not to go to PP by numerous people – there’s little to see, it’s dirty and dangerous and just not worth the effort.
We cycled off to a bike shop through the streets alongside large parks on brand new roads well organised and not busy. Stopped for a coffee and then fought our way through the smaller back streets to the bike shop.
Linda’s handlebar foam has split, so we need to redo it and the cycle shop taped it all up with electrical tape, then bound it with handlebar tape, cleaned Tilly from top to bottom inclduing the chain and drivetrain and Tilly sparkled and looked brand new when they had finished. $13 – and that was the cost of the handler tape! Amazing.
So a very happy Tilly trundled off to the Palace Gate Hotel for a week’s rest.
Linda is pretty good at choosing hotels and this one has to be one of the best hotels we’ve ever stayed at. Amazing place, with a pool area surrounded by greenery and lit by thousands of fairy lights, a rooftop bar decorated in the same fashion and even a french chef who came to see us to cook whatever we wanted. It’s an old French Colonial building (at least some of it is anyway) and it is maintained to perfection. We loved it!
PP has the Royal Palace as it’s main attraction and we wandered around admiring the gorgeous temples and manicured grounds but we’re slightly disappointed at the Silver Pagoda, which is just another beautiful temple with 5000 silver tiles making up the floor, most of which are covered up by a carpet. The ones visible looked a bit bashed and had residue of tape on them. Still, the Palace was well worth the visit and absolutely gorgeous all in all.
The National Museum was one of the main reasons for us coming here. It houses many of the statues from all the temples we had already visited around the country and is itself a wonderful building built by the French in a great mix of European and Cambodia architecture.
The place is full of statues and we thoroughly enjoyed trying to place them in the temples we’d seen.
If you don’t want to go to the Genocide museum or killing fields – which we didn’t- then you’re basically done touristy wise. There’s not a lot to bring you here but it’s a fun lovely city to just wander around.
The river front has a long promenade with gardens and is heaving at night with people coming for picnics and family’s running small stalls mainly selling food and cheap Chinese plastic stuff. They’re not stalls in the normal sense, more a blanket on the ground and a battery powered light. Whole families have their dinner at the stalls whilst waiting to sell food to the passersby.
The large gardens have a very organised evening walking session where everyone goes one way round and the street restaurants and bars are all lit in Neon signs in a very Chinese style.
There are many huge new shiny sky scrapers and Chinese money has paid for much of this. We went for afternoon tea at a tea shop (English cream tea no less) which had 4 A4 pages of choices for type of tea. We didn’t even know there were that many teas!
Linda doesn’t like tea (bloody heathen) and was relieved that there was a cocktail with tea so she didn’t have to indulge in a whole pot of the stuff.. And very nice it all was too with the scones arriving direct from the oven.
This tea room was in a brand new exclusive shopping centre with stores like Dolci & Gibbons 😜 etc there and had about 8 people in it. It had VIP parking for 4 cars and doormen.
Back at our hotel, we spent a lot of time lounging by the pool, getting up late and going to the bar! But for Christmas day we had booked a veggie dinner at The Box Office bar. We’d only found out about this bar doing a 4 course veggie Christmas dinner from an Indonesian family who had been staying at the same hotel as us in Siem Reap..the daughter lives in PP… It was really good with roast potatoes (not as good as Lindas Brothers !!), veggie wellington and Yorkies. Yummy and a great recommendation…. definitely not what we expected when we realised we’d be in Cambodia for Christmas!
The hotel was also all trimmed up for Chrismas and hosted various functions around the pool which they dressed up into an even more amazing fairy land. Sadly there were very few veggie choices on the buffet and nothing Christmassy so we sat in the adjacent lounge bar and had drinks whilst still enjoying the music and fairy land….and with a visit from the man himself, our non Christmas Christmas turned into being the most unexpected one we could ever have had…
Your Christmas sounds fascinatingly different!