Phnom Penh and around

Phnom Penh and around

Cambodia’s teeming capital clusters around the Mekong where it meets the Tonlé Sap and Tonlé Bassac rivers. It’s a vibrant city of myriad markets, glittering pagodas, business towers and French colonial mansions. Centrepiece of the city is the shimmering Royal Palace – a complex of pavilions topped with plunging terracotta rooves and decorated with swirling carvings and glittering mirror-glass. There are courtyards faced with pinnacle-like pagodas, painted corridors and golden Buddhas shrouded in the smoke of hundreds of burning incense sticks.

The city has a great nightlife and restaurant scene and is a hotbed of alternative culture. The best way to see sample it is on one of our bespoke scooter tours – whizzing and weaving through the traffic, stopping-off at night markets for you to sample sizzling prawns, steaming seafood soups and spicy stir-fires served with tamarind and lemongrass and visiting bars and if available seeing some live music.

There’s plenty to do around Phnom Penh too – day trips to wildlife rehabilitation centres (where you can see rescued elephants, one fitted with a prosthetic leg), lonely Khmer temples like those at Takeo and hilltop temples. Phnom Penh is also the jumping off point for visits to the Killing Fields and an exploration of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge led civil war.