Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Phnom Penh, take 2

After saying a weary goodbye to both Angkor and Pierce and Hannah, we took the bus back to Phnom Penh in preparation for making a run to the border for our planned crossing into Laos. If you are, perhaps, looking at a map of Cambodia whilst reading this (mom), you may notice that this doesn't seem to make much sense, but we'd been told the roads through the north-central part of the country were so bad, and likely washed out, that nothing would be making the run through. We later heard from a Cambodian friend that we could indeed have taken a direct bus from Siem Reap to the border town of Stung Treng, an unhappy place of which you'll hear more soon, so who knows.

I was fine with going back to Phnom Penh because I wanted to see the Royal Palace which we'd missed out on our first time around. The morning after we arrived back in town, a sleepy Ben reluctantly climbed into a tuk-tuk with me, and off we went under a sunny and cloudless sky. We arrived at the palace 45 minutes before it was supposed to have closed for the regular 3 hour lunch break, but the guards were closing up shop already, and told us there was no hope for entrance and we'd better come back at 2:00. At this point Ben was all for going back to the hostel and calling it a day, but I was determined to see the darn Palace, so we killed the lunch hour(s) with internet and some food. Around 1:45 the clouds began to roll in but we made it back to the Palace gates, paid the comparatively exorbitant entrance fee, and spent about 20 minutes inside the grounds before the skies opened and we were deluged for the next two hours. The entire place flooded. In the end, we saw those famous sloping gold roofs, took some pretty pictures, and got really really wet... check! another day of rainy season sight-seeing, and a farewell to the capital.

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