Royal Palace & Silver Pagoda

The Royal Palace in Phnom Penh is well worth a visit. The palace itself is magnificent, with gorgeous architecture and interesting art. There are fascinating friezes (the Ramayana features large), little shrines, and some magnificent buildings and displays.

The highlight for many is the incredible silver pagoda. The floor is tiled in silver, and there are incredibe golden buddhas all around the room. You aren't allowed to take photos (and the sign very helpfully has added a no camera phone sign as well as the no camera and no camcorder signs, just to make sure you have understood). So you will just have to imagine a jewel encrusted buddha three times the size of you for me, and then multiply it by several dozen. There is also a throne room, a costume display, and the pavillion that the traditional dances used to take place at.

The palace also contains a trange iron house that was a gift from Napoleon the Third, whihc serves no visible purpose - it must be hard to think what to buy the king who has everyrhing...

Speaking of which, the king still lives here - there are plenty of signs telling you which parts of the palace are off limits.

My only disappointment with this palace was that we went in a pouring rain storm - I would love to go again whne I was less miserably wet!

After lunch we visited the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. Our guide, who had a name that translated as 'Moonflower' and was much easier to remember that the Khmer original, told us about all of the ins and out of the place. Again I was amazed how Hinduism and Buddhism were combined in all of the architecture, where every little corner and layer of the roof seemed to have a symbolic meaning. We were allowed to go inside the Throne Hall and the Silver Pagoda (after taking of our shoes and not being allowed to take pictures). The Silver Pagoda, named because of its floor of 5000 silver tiles (most of which were hidden beneath carpets by the way) is officially called Wat Preah Keo (Tempel of the Emerald Buddha) and was clearly inspired by the temple with the same name in Bangkok, with emerald Buddha and all. Again, it could be considered a bit of a poor man's version of the Thai one. Nevertheless, the many statues, among which a most impressive life-sized gold Buddha with 9584 diamonds, were something to feast the eyes on.

One of the reasons why I had been reading the Ramayana myth was because the outer walls of the temple grounds features a surrounding wall depicting the Ramayana story, as in Bangkok's Wat Preah Keo. Since I hadn't been able to make any sense of the mural paintings last year in Thailand I wasn't going to let that happen again. Unfortunately the lower half of the paintings had been eroded by weather and micro-organisms over the year, so there really wasn't that much to see. Seemingly Cambodia is planning to restore the paintings over the coming years. Ah well, it still was a nice read anyway. ;-)