Cambodia

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

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  • Population:2.3M
  • Timezone:ICT (UTC+7)
  • IATA:PNH
  • Currency:The riel circulates alongside the US dollar, and prices are often quoted in dollars with change given in riel for amounts under a dollar. Cards work in hotels and established restaurants; markets and tuk-tuks are cash.
  • Key Areas:The riverfront and Sisowath Quay · The palace and museum quarter · The shophouse grid behind the river, with its cafés and galleries · Boeung Keng Kang, the modern restaurant district

Overview

Phnom Penh sits where three rivers meet and one of them runs backwards for half the year — a hydrological oddity that shaped the city, its calendar and its food.

History

The city takes its name from a hill and a founding legend: a woman named Penh is said to have recovered sacred figures from the river and raised a shrine on the only rise in a flat landscape, giving Phnom Penh — Penh's hill. Its position at the Chaktomuk confluence made it a natural capital and river port, and a regular street grid, arcaded shophouses and a domed art deco market were laid over the older town in the first half of the twentieth century.

Culture

Kuy teav, a clear pork broth with rice noodles finished at the table, is the standard breakfast and the dish to learn first. Fish amok — coconut curry steamed in banana leaf to a custard — is the national plate. Cooking is milder than Thai, built on prahok fermented fish paste, with Kampot pepper from the south coast as the region's signature. Festivals: Water Festival, at the reversal of the Tonlé Sap, Khmer New Year (April), Pchum Ben, the ancestors' festival. Museums: National Museum of Cambodia, The Silver Pagoda collection.

Practical Info

Safety: An easy-going capital where ordinary city caution applies; bag-snatching from passing motorbikes is the most commonly reported problem, so carry bags on the inside of the pavement. The March-to-May hot season is severe and midday sightseeing is best avoided. Dress rules at the palace — covered shoulders and knees — are enforced at the gate. Language: Khmer. English is the common second language in hospitality and with tuk-tuk drivers; French is still spoken by some older Cambodians but is no longer widely useful. Currency: The riel circulates alongside the US dollar, and prices are often quoted in dollars with change given in riel for amounts under a dollar. Cards work in hotels and established restaurants; markets and tuk-tuks are cash.

Travel

Phnom Penh is built at a confluence, and almost everything about it follows from that. The Mekong arrives from the north, the Tonlé Sap river joins it from the northwest, and the Bassac leaves to the south — four channels meeting in front of the city in a crossing the Khmer call Chaktomuk, the four faces. The Tonlé Sap is the remarkable one: for part of the year the Mekong runs so high that it forces this tributary to reverse and flow backwards, filling the great lake upstream, and when the Mekong drops the lake drains and the river turns around again. A city grew at the hinge of that system because the hinge is where the traffic, the fish and the flood all arrive. The modern shape of the place is layered on top: a low riverside capital with a walled royal compound and its Silver Pagoda facing the water, a national museum holding the finest Angkorian sculpture anywhere, a grid of French-era streets and shuttered shophouses laid over the older town, and a set of markets — one of them a 1930s art deco dome that is a genuine architectural landmark — that are still the city's commercial centre. Phnom Penh is smaller and lower-rise than most Southeast Asian capitals and is best taken slowly: a riverside walk at dusk when the whole city comes out, a morning market, a palace, and a long lunch. Two days is enough to know it, and it is worth them rather than treating the city as an airport on the way to Angkor.

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.

Frequently asked questions

It is worth two days. The National Museum holds the original Khmer sculpture whose copies stand at the temples, so seeing it before Angkor genuinely changes how the temples read — and the palace, the markets and the riverside are a different side of the country entirely.

Diplomatic missions in Phnom Penh

3 embassies based in this city, grouped by region.

Visaja keeps this page's contact details and visa guidance under continuous review — still, requirements can change at short notice, so confirm the essentials with the mission or the official government portal before you travel.