It's a chaotic, fascinating city where pieces of French colonial architecture sit alongside Buddhist temples, massive mostly empty high-rises, the scars of the Khmer Rouge era, and more coffee shops, stalls and stands than you can shake a stick at. Tuk tuks are everywhere, riverside sunsets are beautiful, and the food is both cheap and excellent.
This is where the Tonle Sap meets the Mekong, so in rainy season the Tonle Sap actually reverses: water that flowed down from Siem Reap gets pushed back upriver by the swollen Mekong.
Sights & Culture
Riverside
The main tourist strip along the Tonle Sap, varying from a very pleasant 20–30 minute walk to a very crowded, chaotic one depending on the time of day. It's best combined with a visit to the Royal Palace nearby. On Sat/Sun evenings after 5pm it becomes Walk Street, a busy market with food and drink stalls. Many of the things on offer might not appeal to a Western palate, but many will. Be warned, the seating is not sturdy. Along the strip: Independence Monument, the King's Monument (just before it), the Cambodia–Vietnam Friendship Monument, and the Cambodian Constitution Monument, as well as the Night Market.
Royal Palace
$10 entry. Shoulders and knees must be covered (coverings rentable on site), though we saw plenty of people flouting that rule to various degrees. It's impressive, with some beautiful architecture, but $10 is a lot for what is essentially external sightseeing of the buildings. If money's a concern, you're really just seeing bigger, better versions of things visible for free elsewhere in the city.
Wat Phnom
The Buddhist temple that gave the city its name. It's about 2km north of Riverside and in the middle of a roundabout. You can follow the gentle (but not very smooth) slopes upwards, or just do the steps out front.
Wat Ounalom Monastery
A monumental Buddhist temple compound, opened in 1443, featuring elaborate stupas and a monastery. It's very close to Riverside and apparently offers meditation sessions to the public, though I couldn't find any published timings.
Bassac Lane
A haven for backpackers and one of Phnom Penh's unofficial red light districts, this short street gives cyberpunk vibes, with lively bars and restaurants on both sides. You'll see a lot of girls overdressed for the venue at outdoor tables.
Independence Monument
Built in 1958 to celebrate Cambodia's independence from France, this monument forms a roundabout on one of the central streets of the city.
Statue of His Majesty Preah Bat Samdech Preah Norodom Sihanouk
Set in a small park flanked by busy roads, this statue commemorates the father king of Cambodia.
Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship Monument
Museums & Galleries
Genocide Museum/S-21
Tuol Sleng was a high school before the Khmer Rouge turned it into Security Prison 21, and that's what makes a visit land the way it does. The classrooms are still classrooms, the stairwell railings still school railings, there's playground equipment kids would hang from and that the Khmer Rouge would later literally hang people from. It takes a moment to reconcile that against what happened inside them. I paid $5 to get in, hours run 8am to 5pm, and the dress code requires the same coverage as the Royal Palace. Give it two to three hours if you read and listen to the material properly. (Do get the audio guide.) One room holds the prison's rules, photographed and translated ("while getting lashes or electrification, you must absolutely not scream or cry out"), and there are single-occupant cells built so crudely you can hear everything happening in the corridor outside, and there's no way you could actually be held in the thin wooden cells, which tells you more about the psychology of the place than any placard could. Long corridors are given over to mugshots, not of prisoners but of guards and interrogators, an uncomfortable inversion that makes you look at ordinary young faces and wonder what you're supposed to feel. A temporary exhibition when I visited, Childhood Without Colour, covered children conscripted into the regime, a thread that runs through the main galleries too since spouses and children of the accused were routinely killed alongside them under Khmer Rouge policy.
Is it worth doing? Yes, and I'd say essential rather than optional if you're spending any time in Phnom Penh, but go in prepared for what it actually is rather than a conventional museum. The piles of clothing and personal effects in one gallery gave me the same gut-drop as Birkenau, that specific horror of an atrocity reduced to laundry, and the confession archive is the part that stays with you longest: prisoners tortured into inventing conspiracies so absurd they're almost farcical, except that the invention was the point, and the people who wrote them were killed regardless. Only twelve of at least 18,063 people processed here are known to have survived. Some visitors pair it with Choeung Ek (the Killing Fields site, about 15km out) on the same day — I'd not recommend it; take some time between them. It's not a place I'd call moving in the usual travel-writing sense; it's closer to necessary, and I don't think that's a bad thing for a museum to be.
A closer look: Kerry Hamill
Kerry Hamill was a New Zealander from Whakatane, the eldest of five children, sailing around the world when his yacht Foxy Lady strayed into Cambodian waters in August 1978. He'd sailed the boat from Australia with his girlfriend Gail Colley and a Canadian, Stuart Glass; Gail left the crew before the final leg, on which the British traveller John Dewhirst joined instead. Cambodian forces captured the boat off Koh Tang Island on 13 August 1978. Both men were taken to S-21.
Under torture, Hamill gave a confession that reads as almost absurd, which was rather the point: he named Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a CIA superior, listed his family's home telephone number as his agent code, and named family friends as fellow operatives, inventing a network out of whatever was to hand while still, by his brother's later account, managing to signal that none of it was real. He signed and thumb-printed the document on 17 September 1978 and left a signature on a further one on 13 October. No record survives of the date he was killed. Duch, the prison's commandant, later testified he believed Hamill and Dewhirst were killed together and their bodies burned, though no documentation of this was found.
The Hamill family learned of Kerry's fate two years later, from the front page of a New Zealand newspaper. Eight months after that, his brother John, to whom he'd been close, took his own life. Their mother died in 2003, their father in 2011, neither living to see what came next: in 2009, another brother, Rob, gave testimony as a civil party at the ECCC, the tribunal set up to try senior Khmer Rouge figures, and told Duch directly, "When you killed my brother Kerry, you killed my brother John as well." Duch was convicted in 2010, the first Khmer Rouge cadre held accountable by the tribunal, and died in prison in 2020.
National Museum
Mainly Angkor-era stone statues. $10 entry. Beautifully crafted sandstone sculptures with incredible detail, spanning three main periods and showing both Hindu and Buddhist influence. Includes the story of the Douglas Latchford affair — a dealer who looted a great many antiquities. It is worth remembering the Khmer Rouge itself destroyed countless priceless artefacts during its purges, which complicates any simple villain narrative, as his theft has preserved a number of priceless treasures that his family have posthumously returned.
The Killing Fields (Choeung Ek)
Choeung Ek sits about 10km outside Phnom Penh, and it's worth taking a taxi rather than a tuk tuk given the distance and the road. Most people combine it with Tuol Sleng on the same day; I wouldn't. Give yourself space between the two, a different day if you can manage it, since sitting with what you've seen at one before walking into the other blunts both. Entry is $6, and the audio guide is worth paying for, narrated by the same voice as the Tuol Sleng one, so the two visits feel like continuous chapters rather than separate stops.
The numbers set the scale before you've walked ten metres: an estimated one in four Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge, across more than 300 killing fields nationwide, of which Choeung Ek is the best known because it served S-21. Trucks brought victims from the prison two or three times a week in the early years, rising to daily deliveries by 1978. Most of the original structures here were dismantled long ago, so what you're walking through now is landscaped ground over mass graves rather than standing buildings, which changes the register of the visit compared to Tuol Sleng.
The regime's internal caste system is laid out clearly on site. "New people", evacuated from Phnom Penh and other cities in April 1975 (hence also called "17 April people"), were treated as suspect by definition, soft hands and glasses being enough to mark someone as an intellectual and therefore an enemy. Set against them were the "old people" or "base people", the rural peasantry who'd lived under Khmer Rouge control before the capital fell, who were the regime's favoured class. It's worth pointing out that this city-versus-country framing was a fairly serious departure from the Marxist theory the regime claimed to be implementing, which was never meant to romanticise agrarian life over urban labour in this way. Family loyalty was displaced too: reverence for parents and ancestors was to be redirected to "Angkar", the Organisation, meaning the state.
The mechanics of killing here are the part that's hardest to process. Bullets were considered too expensive to use on mass executions, so people were killed instead with whatever was cheap: machetes, hammers, farm tools, sharpened bamboo. It's the inverse of the Nazi trajectory, which moved toward gas partly because shooting people at close range was wearing down the soldiers doing it; the Khmer Rouge's calculation ran the other way, prioritising cost over the brutality the method inflicted on the victim. Loudspeakers played music from the trees to cover the sound of the executions, a detail that's marked on site and that the audio guide dwells on. The "killing tree", against which children were killed by being swung by the ankles, is marked and is the single hardest thing to stand in front of.
A few other things stay with you: a spirit house on the grounds, a pre-Buddhist and pre-Hindu tradition of honouring ancestors and giving restless spirits somewhere to be, feels like the site's one gesture toward peace. Remains of nine Westerners have been identified here; roughly 40 further graves are left deliberately undisturbed underwater, a decision I found more respectful than excavating everything possible. Some killing fields elsewhere in the country still can't be surveyed properly because of landmines, which is a reminder this isn't only historical. Not every bone recovered is on display — there simply isn't room — and the memorial stupa, seventeen tiers high, holds what has been. Visitors can lay a flower there. There's also a short film and a small museum section, useful if you want context before or after walking the grounds, though the grounds themselves are the point.
Worth doing: yes, without qualification, but don't stack it with Tuol Sleng on the same day. Take the time to breathe between them, ideally an overnight gap, rather than trying to process both in one sitting.
Sosoro
Cambodian Museum of Economy and Money is a new museum. It explains Cambodian history through the lens of money, offering a genuinely strong narrative all the way through, though a few large gaps exist in the history. The top floor is focused on the historical kingdoms of Cambodia, whereas the ground floor is more modern history of the Khmer Rouge and the successor governments. $5 entry, 9am–6pm, closed Mondays. Near the far end of Riverside. Includes a French–Cambodia friendship exhibition next door, which is only in French and Khmer.
Parks & Gardens
Veal Preah Meru Square
An open green space near the National Museum.
Restaurants & Bars
Tamab Noodle
A noodle cart owned by a friend of the family I was visiting. Huge portions and good food.
Beans & Co
A small local restaurant, with good lok lak and a lot of coffee options. Previously an explicitly Thai place, they rebranded due to the ongoing border conflicts to re-attract custom.
Boré Restaurant
An upmarket Cambodian restaurant in a park near Wat Phnom. The food is excellent, and whilst expensive compared to many restaurants, the ambiance and service make it worthwhile.
Big MaMa
A multi-floor Italian on Bassac Street — the calzone was great, and the rooftop offers views and a way to listen to the live bands of Bassac Street without getting crowded.
Romduol Khmer Restaurant
Really good local food, until it got super busy with a tour group and we got a little lost in the chaos. A friend had the deep-fried frogs.
Compass Riverside
A reasonable Mexican, with good portions and fast service. Not super-spicy, but that might have been because we don't look local.
Tube Coffee
Really nice, super chill white-and-chrome vibe with a lot of locations, huge coffees, with a sliding scale of sugar you point to when ordering. They're obviously used to Americans visiting who want the small shot of coffee with their sugar drink.
Pizza 4P's (Riverside)
Book an outside table ahead of time and get there just before dusk (17:30–18:00) for views of the tourist boats lit up on the river. It's actually a chain across Asia.
Grab App
Excellent for ordering in. Imagine Uber merged with DHL, Ocado and a dozen other things. Want a board game delivered in 10 minutes from a games store? Want curry while your spouse wants a steak and kidney pie? Want a syringe of Ozempic? All these and more are possible with Grab. It's also the best way to call a tuk tuk, and you can put your card details in to pay the driver without using cash. Very handy given how low-cost tuk tuk rides are, and how unlikely you are to get change from a $5 bill.
Shopping
Aeon Mall
There are three of these within the boundaries of Phnom Penh. They're big shopping malls with food courts and, generally, a cinema. If you need anything specific, they're a good place to go, but they could be any mall anywhere in the world. Apple, Decathlon, GAP etc. all have stores. Only the food court is more local, though KFC and Pizza Hut are present and accounted for.
Supermarkets
Everywhere, and many have a lot of Western (read American) products and varying markups. Most of the local options for soda and iced coffee are better, but sweeter treats may reward familiarity.
Night Market
At the far end of Riverside on evenings other than Sat/Sun. Worth a visit, but it's not that large and not as chaotic as the Central Market or the Russian Market.
Russian Market
Probably the better of the two markets, it's got more random items, like a section selling scooter parts and a big meat section in the centre. Plenty of souvenirs if you want them, though most will be from China.
Central Market
At the centre of the Central Market is the jewellery hall, which is pretty cool to see, and all around the edges are stalls, broadly on the same theme in each section, so you'll find household, clothing and food each grouped together.
The Olympia Mall
You'd think it was closing down from the vibes — there's an active pickleball court, but everything else except the cinema seems like it's given up.
Sports & Activities
Big Bus Angkor City Tour
A 1.5-hour hop-on hop-off bus tour with audio guide, $9. Sunset and night options are available, though the timetable doesn't always reflect when the sun actually goes down. Good orientation for early in the visit. Like most tours of this kind, it could stand to give a bit more time at the key stops, or run more regular buses to make hop-on hop-off practical.
Olympia Cinema
VIP room $10, includes a free welcome drink and popcorn. Huge reclining chairs; the audience was only around 20 people, so a comfortable watch.