Clint and I got back to Penom Penh and got a room at the 'Okay' guest house, spent the day seeing the inner-city sites, the palace and national museum, both of which were what you might expect. I ended up spending most of the museum time sitting on a bench in the garden observing museum goers and the lotus ponds. The palace was somewhat interesting, with lots of buddha statues that had been taken and buried in the forest during the Khmer Rouge, as well as a 'silver pagoda' whose floor consisted of 3000+ tiles made entirely of silver, each weighing ~1-2kgs.
We had planned to catch a boat down the Mekong River the following day but I woke with a start that morning, just 30mins before departure, with the realization that my Vietnam visa wasn't valid for another day. So instead we stayed another day in Penom Penh mostly lazing about, and had planned to spend all day that way but were convinced by an enterprising young rickshaw driver to go down to the Wat Penom to celebrate the Cambodian New Year. We had been aware that it was 'new year' weekend but had been surprised at how quiet things were, and had decided it was more of a family time.
From the driver's description it sounded like the only people that would be down at the wat were the small group of loners that didn't have any family in town that they could visit, so we were a bit surprised when we arrived and the park was packed with people, young, old and everyone in between. Similar to other Asian and Indian celebrations, for New Years the Cambodians throw baby powder and water on each other as part of the celebrations; needless to say it only took about 5 minutes for Clint and Ito get our first dousing of powder. Our rickshaw driver had come into the park with us to show us around and he quickly had us buy two bottles of powder to join in on the dispensing.
At first I was a bit skittish about getting powdered and doing any powdering but that soon wore off and before long we were both fairly well covered in powder and doing our fair bit of dispensing. Apparently this powdering has been a tradition for a long time but this year the government was trying to discourage it, we never found out why exactly. At one point a police officer came up with a sour look and snatched the bottle of powder out of my hand and threw it in the garbage; it was at this point that our driver decided to tell us that the powdering was 'not allowed' this year.
During our walking around Clint braved to try a friend cricket and I decided to give cockroach a shot, I have to say that it was better than the cricket, more crunchy but not as salty.
Photos: Penom Penh
We had planned to catch a boat down the Mekong River the following day but I woke with a start that morning, just 30mins before departure, with the realization that my Vietnam visa wasn't valid for another day. So instead we stayed another day in Penom Penh mostly lazing about, and had planned to spend all day that way but were convinced by an enterprising young rickshaw driver to go down to the Wat Penom to celebrate the Cambodian New Year. We had been aware that it was 'new year' weekend but had been surprised at how quiet things were, and had decided it was more of a family time.
From the driver's description it sounded like the only people that would be down at the wat were the small group of loners that didn't have any family in town that they could visit, so we were a bit surprised when we arrived and the park was packed with people, young, old and everyone in between. Similar to other Asian and Indian celebrations, for New Years the Cambodians throw baby powder and water on each other as part of the celebrations; needless to say it only took about 5 minutes for Clint and Ito get our first dousing of powder. Our rickshaw driver had come into the park with us to show us around and he quickly had us buy two bottles of powder to join in on the dispensing.
At first I was a bit skittish about getting powdered and doing any powdering but that soon wore off and before long we were both fairly well covered in powder and doing our fair bit of dispensing. Apparently this powdering has been a tradition for a long time but this year the government was trying to discourage it, we never found out why exactly. At one point a police officer came up with a sour look and snatched the bottle of powder out of my hand and threw it in the garbage; it was at this point that our driver decided to tell us that the powdering was 'not allowed' this year.
During our walking around Clint braved to try a friend cricket and I decided to give cockroach a shot, I have to say that it was better than the cricket, more crunchy but not as salty.
Photos: Penom Penh
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