Phnom Penh, Cambodia: the river confluence, the palace and the markets

Stand on the riverside promenade and you are looking at one of the more unusual pieces of hydrology on earth. Three rivers meet here in four channels — the Mekong coming down from the north, the Tonlé Sap joining from the northwest, and the Bassac branching away south — and the Khmer name for the junction, Chaktomuk, means four faces. The extraordinary part is seasonal. During the monsoon the Mekong carries so much water that it overwhelms the junction and pushes the Tonlé Sap river backwards, up its own course, into the great lake in the interior, which swells to several times its dry-season size. When the Mekong falls, the lake empties and the river resumes its normal direction. That reversal governs the fishery that feeds much of the country, and the moment it turns is marked by the Water Festival, when boat crews race on the river in front of the city and Phnom Penh fills with people from the provinces. Even outside festival season the river is the city's front room: the promenade fills every evening with families, exercise classes, food carts and kite sellers, and it is the single best hour to be outdoors here.

The palace compound occupies a long stretch of the riverfront behind a cream and ochre wall, and it is a working royal residence, so parts are closed and the open sections shift. What you can reliably see is the Throne Hall, with its tiered roof and tall central spire, and the compound's gardens, pavilions and murals. The building people remember is the Silver Pagoda, in the southern part of the enclosure — named for a floor laid with thousands of solid silver tiles, most of it kept covered to protect it, with a section left exposed so visitors can see what the whole floor is. Inside stand a Buddha of gold and another carved from a single block of green crystal, and the enclosing wall carries a long painted mural of the Reamker, the Khmer telling of the Ramayana, which repays walking slowly. Dress is enforced here and enforced properly: shoulders and knees covered for everyone, no exceptions, and it is a long hot walk from the ticket gate to the shade, so come early in the day rather than at noon.

The National Museum sits a block from the palace in an unmistakable terracotta-red building with a courtyard and a lotus pond in the middle, and it holds the best collection of Khmer sculpture in existence — much of it brought from the Angkorian sites, where what stands today is frequently a copy while the original is here. The pieces to look for are the pre-Angkorian standing figures, whose modelling is quite different from the later temple style, and a celebrated reclining bronze fragment. It is a small enough museum to see properly in an hour or two, and seeing it before Angkor rather than after changes how the temples read. Nearby, Wat Phnom is the reason the city has its name: a temple on the only hill in a flat city, founded according to legend by a woman named Penh who found sacred figures in the river and raised a shrine for them on the mound — phnom is hill, so the city is simply Penh's hill. It functions as a working temple with a steady traffic of people making offerings, and the small park around it is one of the few pieces of shade in the centre.

Over the older town lies a regular grid of streets from the first half of the twentieth century, and it gives central Phnom Penh a character no other Cambodian city has: wide boulevards, a numbered street system that makes navigation unusually easy, and long runs of two- and three-storey shophouses with shuttered upper floors and arcaded pavements. Much of it is worn and some of it is disappearing, but the stock that survives has increasingly been taken over by cafés, small galleries and design shops, particularly in the blocks behind the riverfront. The set piece is Phsar Thmey, the Central Market: a vast ochre art deco structure from the 1930s built as a cross with a great dome over the crossing, and one of the more striking market buildings anywhere in Asia. The dome sells gold and watches, the arms sell everything else, and the produce spills into the streets outside. It is worth entering for the architecture even if you buy nothing — stand under the centre of the dome and look up.

Phnom Penh eats early and eats out. The default breakfast is kuy teav, a clear pork broth with rice noodles assembled to order and finished at the table with herbs, lime, chilli and a spoon of sugar — sold from shophouse kitchens and street carts from before dawn, and the single most useful dish to learn the name of. At lunch the national dish is amok, a coconut curry of fish steamed in banana leaf until it sets to a custard, mild and aromatic rather than hot. Cambodian cooking is generally less chilli-driven than Thai and leans on prahok, a fermented fish paste, and on Kampot pepper from the south coast, which is genuinely one of the world's better peppers and the most portable thing to take home. For markets beyond the Central, the Russian Market in the south of the city is the one for textiles, silverwork and food stalls squeezed into a low hall, and Phsar Kandal near the river is a straightforward working produce market. Add a strong independent café scene in the shophouse blocks and the city is an easy place to eat well without planning.

Phnom Penh International (PNH) sits close to the city with regional connections across Southeast Asia, and a rail link and road run into the centre. Overland, buses reach Siem Reap in five to six hours and Ho Chi Minh City in six or so, and the Mekong itself is a route — boats run north to Siem Reap in high water and downriver into Vietnam. In the city, tuk-tuks and app-hailed remorques are the standard way to move and are cheap and plentiful; agree the ride through the app or settle it before setting off, and note that the numbered grid makes describing a destination unusually simple. On seasons: the dry months from November to February are the comfortable ones, with the March-to-May hot season genuinely severe, and the rains from roughly June to October arriving as heavy afternoon downpours rather than all-day drizzle — the countryside is at its greenest then and the rivers at their highest. The Water Festival at the reversal of the Tonlé Sap fills the city to capacity; it is a spectacle, and it is also the hardest week of the year to find a room.