Day 15 - Mekong Cruise Day 4

Today I woke rather early at about 2:30am, after I struggled to get to sleep I finally started to doze off just after 5am. I finally managed 45 minutes or so of sleep and woke to my 6am alarm. This gave me enough time so I could get up and watch our floating home come into Phnom Penh. As all the docks were already occupied we ended up docking next to a ship already docked.

After breakfast we ventured off on our choice of sightseeing to the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, we had the choice of going on a cyclone, visit the Nation Museum of Cambodia or visit the Killing Fields and the Sleng Genocide Museum, as I had already seen Auschwitz when I was in Germany, I didn't want to see the them, and as the others were going to the Royal Palace, I figured I'd go see that instead. It seems a bit odd disembarking this ship via another vessel, however that seems to be a rather common thing.

The Royal Palace is the official residence to the King of Cambodia, established when Phnom Penh was made capital in 1866 by King Norodom. The King here is King by title, and has no controlling decisions, that is left for parliament and their prime minister, just like England. The Royal Palace is divided into a few different compounds, the Throne Hall, Banquet Hall, The Royal Residence, a number of different Pavilions and The Silver Pagoda. I tried to take a photo of the Throne Hall not knowing that we weren't allowed to, a hand came up and stopped me from taking any photos, why they stop people I don't know, you can easily walk down the side of the building and just take a photo through one of the windows.

We headed over to the Silver Pagoda, the places holds a bunch of national treasures like the Green crystal (Emerald-Crystal) Buddah, or the large 90kg gold standing Buddah. What is named after however is the 5000 silver handcrafted tiles covering the floor, unfortunately these are pretty well covered by carpets, so you don't really get a chance to see these. The tour was pretty well much over after this so we made our way back to the bus while trying to avoid as much of the rain as possible.

After getting back to Serenity we had time to relax, I went onto one of the decks to chill, I noticed a couple of guys working on a projector and PC, I could feel myself twitching and itching to help, there were working for about 20 minutes until Mike asked Yee if they needed help and I explained I do this sort of thing for a job, took about 5 to 10 minutes to get an idea of how it was all setup, but finally got the PC and projector working. Before heading down and having some lunch.

Mike, Gill, James and I decided to head out and walk down to the Market. It was a very hot afternoon and we got several Tuk Tuk drivers asking if we wanted a ride, we were happy enough walking around, but we could understand why people would rather take a Tuk Tuk than walk. We found our way to the market., passing a couple of spots we had seen on the bus ride earlier in the day, one spot we came over was a peace dove, made from old Machine guns. There was a bus taking some of the others from the boat to the market, which passed us on the way, we arrived and eventually ran into a number of them. We check out the Russian market which splitted off into different directions all running back to the center of the building, each different arm seems to sell something different, for example, on section sold technology, another selling shirts, where even decided to buy a shirt or two, for USD $2 each I couldn't complain. There was another section that was doing hair and makeup, and so on. We headed to the bus to catch a ride back to our boat, By this stage, word must have spread that I did IT stuff, and I spent the bus ride back sorting our a couple of people's eSims on their phones which didn't seem to be working.

Back at the ship tonight prior to dinner, we sat back and watched a wonderful dance performance from a group of children from nearby schools. They had some shirts for sale after the dance performance, so Dad decided to buy one, surprising, they actually had a shirt that fit him... Not offence to dad, but in Vietnam even a XXXL was a struggle, seems like Cambodia might have some proper shirt sizes. After the performance we headed downstairs for our dinner, I wasn't really feeling overly hungry for dinner, so I ended up just having a Main meal, as I wanted ordering an apertizer, soup or Dessert, Rachey our waitress brought me out an extra serving of the beef meal. That was enough for me, to be honest probably too much, I decided I'd head to bed early as I was feeling pretty tired.