Day 9 – Tuesday 6th January – The Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda

I forgot to mention the price of yesterday’s lunch - $US0.25 each for a good sized plates of noodles with chicken. You pay $US1 for a can of Coca Cola, but virtually nothing for the actual food. Dinner was on the roof top bar of our hotel – fabulous.

I am writing this in Bangkok, on the last leg of the trip. I am writing from the executive lounge on the 31st floor of the Millennium Hilton hotel during the 6-8:30om Happy Hour (more about that later – it’s a highlight). It’s 7pm and dark and the night lights are absolutely brilliant. We were last in Bangkok 20 years ago and in that time it has been transformed from a dirty, poor, bustling city full of beggars, two stroke motorbikes, copy watches and only a few high rises into a beautiful modern city with a night time skyline to match any city in the world. Beneath me, on the river, the ferries and dinner cruisers which are all brilliantly lit up are crusing up and down. There are some local feries that are shaped and lit up like pagodas and they look brilliant as they pirouette around on the river as they maneuver towards their docking stations. Anne is just videoing it, so I’ll put it up on the site for you to see it. It’s awesome.

The sight seeing today was a lot easier (back to 6th January), as we only had to walk down the road about 400m to the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. The Royal Palace is beautiful, with lots of gold tile roofed buildings, detailed carvings, frescoes, temples, and tombs. The Silver Pagoda is so named because the floor of the temple is made of 5,000 1 kg silver covered floor tiles. It sounds impressive, but in reality all the impressive stuff is the decoration on the outside of the buildings.

The Cambodian Government is struggling to pay the upkeep on these beautiful buildings. The Russians did quite a lot of work to help out a few years ago (there is a lot of foreign aid in Cambodia – UNESCO, the UN itself and many other aid organisations are very common sites around Phnom Penh). The Japanese government is building a $US20m drainage system in Phnom Penh to stop the central city flooding in the monsoon season. They also rebuilt one of the bridges destroyed during one of the many military campaigns and it is know as the Japanese Friendship Bridge. We also read about a bunch of American school children that raised $US30,000 to build a 500 children school in one of the provinces. The American organisers who range in age from 13-15 had just been in Cambodia to open the school, so quite a lot of people are doing their bit to help them out.

The weather in Phnom Penh has been absolutely brilliant, clear blue skies and really hot. It makes for great photos, but we’re also glad that there was a bit of cloud cover in Siem Reap, as all the walking would have been very hard work in this heat.

A hard cased drinks seller approached us on our way to the Palace - a young girl of about 10. She asked us “Where are you from? England – Lovely Jubblies. No? Australia? A deengoes got ma baybay” We just cracked up – the accent and the phrases were hilarious. We bought a bottle of water from her just for the comedy routine that came with it.

We’ve been doing some bargaining in the markets, when we buy stuff, although not terribly much, as the first price they mention sounds so reasonable. They expect it though, so we do it as much to be polite as anything else and the banter is a lot of fun. They’re all very friendly and in the main seem reasonably comfortably off, but still probably 15-20 years behind where Thailand (or Bangkok anyway) is.

Our cab driver says that he likes New Zealanders and Australians as we are always so friendly. I thought he was just saying it, until I saw the way that some other nationalities treat the local people – European mainly, but it’s pretty appalling. They are very condescending.

Our hotel advertises itself as being Carbon zero hotel, although I can’t see that it’s any different from any other hotel that I’ve been in recently – flat screen television, little card about re-using towels that gets consistently ignored everyday by the house staff, even if we hang the towels up. I think the most carbon zero thing about the place must be the remote control that opens and closes the curtains – forget the carbon zero, there are so many remote controls it’s certainly effort zero.

The hotel is really fantastic, but I was a bit distressed when I crossed the street to take a photo of its exterior. Take a look for yourself, it would have to be the most architecturally unsympathetic addition to any neighbourhood you could imagine. The buildings on either side of it are identical, with nice balconies and flowers and wooden doorways, and then along comes our lot and plonks this minimalist white thing right in the middle of it. They could have made the exterior façade look like the rest of the street and still had the interior the way they want it. Never mind, that what happens in these sorts of places – good town planning.

We had dinner and a bottle of wine at the Foreign Correspondents Club. This place is a local institution - a friend from New York, even wrote to insist that we drop in there for a drink. Both the Siem Reap and Phnom Penh hotels are owned by FCC, but the original FCC, where we are having dinner started during one of the civil or Vietnam wars and was the watering hole obviously of the foreign journalists. It is an open air restaurant / bar on the second and third floors of a French colonial building. It has bar stools all round the sides and big leather chairs in the middle. You can sit on the bar stools and watch the coming and goings on the Mekong River, or just relax in the arm chairs.