Photos 33: I May Have Lied About The Temples (Palaces Also)

In Phnom Penh (or HoChiMinh, it is hard to remember) I detached myself for a day and had a look around the principal attraction of the cty, whatever it was called, which was the royal enclosure housing the major governmental and spiritual buildlings of the country.
Now if I could only remember which one it was...

There were, as you can see, a lot of very large and impressive things to see. All in one walled estate, and this was just the stuff not in official use that was open to the public!

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This was the golden pavilion or some such similarly holy thing. The huge ornate thing in the middle (generally the largest building in these pictures is the silver pagoda, and if they had allowed photography inside I could show you how it got the name: the entire floor is paved with silver tiles, each at least coated with with some of the precious metal.
When I was there they seemed to have an overabundance of carpet, but it's hardly surprising.
The clergy probably flogged all the tiles in the centre of the room centuries ago

And yes, it must have been Phnom Penh because there was this model of a fully complete Angkor Wat in the grounds, remember the scale of the place and that the real-life distance from each of those oposing walls is a good quarter of a mile or something, the length of that vast causeway leading up to the main gates the same again and more:

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The National Museum was next, the outside of which was beautiful itself:

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The inside of which contained a water garden, fully enclosed in the central courtyard, and home to bookish visitors, some highly keen fish, and a little colourful flora, too:

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Elsewhere in the city there were a large number of hotels in the quintessential backpacker's area (we were staying elsewhere, in nicer digs ) most of which on the West side of the street were projecting out over a very large lake:

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And just a few other things frm around the city:

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Almsot finished Cambodia! Now I really can't remember - did I show you the Dead Fish hotel in Siem Reap, the crocodiles in the bar and all that?
Well it wasn;t lit very well but I did get a couple of photos. I did rather chuckle at the way the staff thought of their security policy re: the fact that had a dozen or so angry reptiles at their disposal -

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Okay that actually was it for Cambodia; Most of Vietnam has precious little to represent it here, unfortunately. But still;
here we are
from park and bar
the state revealed
of traveler's field;