Visit of Oudong
On our way to Phnom Penh, after a super long drive, we stopped in Oudong, the old royal city. Again we were confronted with a huge amount of stairs, 800 if I remember well. We did not stay very long at the top with the stupa’s, we just took some pictures of the surroundings and the royal city complex. After that, we made our way back to the taxi. We had to search a bit since it was not immediately obvious where the driver had parked the car.
Last moments in Phnom Penh
At 3 pm we checked in at The Plantation Urban Resort and Spa (same hotel as when we first arrived in Phnom Penh) and we had a quick lunch at the hotel 30 minutes later. The rest of the afternoon we enjoyed the beautiful pool and then we started to organise our luggage for our return to Belgium.
The day after, we had a calm day, a last swim and a visit to our favourite restaurant Friends (together with my colleague who lived temporarily in the capital). In the late afternoon, we took a taxi to the airport for our flight to Belgium via Bangkok…
Our Cambodia adventure was over. We really enjoyed the trip, the visits and certainly the delicious food.
South East Asia was not so high on our agenda (except for the food) but it is well worth a visit.
Bye bye Cambodia
What did we remember the most about Cambodia ?
- The kind, friendly inhabitants of this country and especially the children waving and shouting “hello hello” when we passed by.
- A country where most families are still confronted with the gruesome past where so many got murdered. But they had the courage to build up their country and look towards the future.
- The traffic that was terrible. Crossing the road took a lot of courage and a lot of practice.
- In Belgium road works seemed to take forever. Here it also takes forever, but the complete road between 2 different cities was tackled at once for tens of kms. On top of that, drivers had to make the entrance to the petrol station themselves 🙂 It sometimes felt like we were driving in the dunes.
- The number of petrol stations per km was enormous compared to Belgium.
- The waste along the road and at some temple complexes was terrible.
- We never saw so many policemen and each of them seemed to have a different uniform.
- Wedding parties were organized alongside the road. Large tents were set up and some even had a band that provided the music. Whoever lived next door or stayed at a hotel in the area could enjoy it as well 😉
- Most of the cars were SUVs (Lexuses & Toyota).
- A lot of temple complexes had a huge amount of stairs.
- The food was soooooo good (especially fish amok and beef lok lak)
- We really enjoyed the colonial style of hotels and the absolute topper was certainly the Old Cinema hotel in Kampot
