Two New Yorkers spend six months 18 months!?! in Bangalore and other places in India.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Phnom Penh Take 1

When we arrived in Cambodia, we ended up having to spend a while getting our visas. A big German tour group was in front of us, and that held up things a bit. We'd known about the eVisa, but hadn't gotten our act together and applied for them. I'm not certain that they would have saved much time -- the single line for them was kind of slow-moving too.

We stayed at the Foreign Correspondents Club, a slick bar and restaurant that also has a few very nice rooms. Their marketing is so clever that the New York Times' infamous article on Phnom Penh bought into its roving-reporter shtick. For the record, there are no feverish writers working on their next Pulitzer there, or at least no more than anywhere else. We liked the place a lot, but we thought the game was given a way a bit by their cool t-shirts, which cost $15. That's about five times more than I'd expect anything like that to cost in Cambodia. (I still want on, though.)

Here's a picture from our room window. The beat-down mansion in the foreground will probably be fixed up soon -- one exactly like it a couple doors down is now owned by the United Nations, if I recall correctly, and they have clearly sunk a lot of money into it. In the background is the National Museum.



After this quick visit to Phnom Penh, it was on to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. After we checked into our hotel, rented bikes, got our $40 passes for Angkor Wat, and actually arrived, it was lunchtime. This turned out to be a blessing, since we missed a quick but powerful downpour.

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