Royal stuff (Jan. 20/09 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia)

The centrepiece in downtown Phnom Penh is the big glitzy Royal Palace, which is home sweet home for Cambodia's Royal Family. Visitors are allowed to wander around inside the sprawling complex, which includes a bunch of seperate buildings, pagodas, and stupas as well as manicured gardens and long elaborate fences. Rooflines were built with fancy upturned eave decorations and spires, and sculptured columns and regal paint schemes were everywhere. We weren't allowed to go in the main ceremonial Throne Hall today, as there was some sort of high profile official event going on that warranted armed guards all over the place, a red carpet leading up the steps, and American flags hung everywhere. So we wandered through the other accessible buildings, which included the Silver Pagoda - a beautifully decorated structure that served as a place for meditation. Inside, the floor comprises over 5000 tiles made of solid silver, and one of the many Buddah statues inside included one made from 90kg of solid gold, inlaid with 2,086 diamonds - one of which was a massive 25 carats! We couldn't help but notice how elaborate and expensive the royal "stuff" was - everything was silver or gold and adorned with gemstones - especially considering the level of poverty that the majority of Cambodians live with.

Right next door is the National Museum, which houses an impressive collection of sculptures, artifacts, photos, and ancient inscribed steles from pre-Angkorian Cambodia right up to hunting tools from the 1800's. Normally, this all would have been very interesting and worthy of a long, thorough visit, but we were pretty "history'd out" and really couldn't summon the interest to spend more than an hour there.

We found a funky little tapas place for lunch that employs former street kids, and those kids made some damn good food! Our next ordeal was to figure out how to get ourselves down to Phu Quoc Island in Vietnam in a few days, where we hope to spend a few days diving, kayaking, and lounging on some gorgeous beaches. It's not on a main bus route and involves the sometimes tricky Vietnam border crossing, so it warranted some special planning. A few visits to local travel agents for advice and some Google searches later, we had a plan and bus tickets to Kep, near the border on the Cambodian coast. From there, we're going to wing it and hope we can make our way to Phu Quoc easily enough.

With the luxury of satellite tv in our room, we were able to stay up until the wee hours of the morning to watch the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. It's funny how being on the opposite side of the world, 12 time zones away, the chilly January scenes of North America didn't seem that unfamiliar. The ceremony was definitely worth staying up for, and we are hopeful that this will mark the beginning of a new era for the US and the rest of the world. No pressure, Obama!