Day 11Another day a few less dollars!
7am wake up call and off to the royal palace by 8.30am! It was already hot and as requested had put a longer sleeve t-shirt on out of respect for the king. They seem to worship him as some kind of living god and when a king dies they put up a monument to him. Apparently the current king was a member of the Khymer Rouge and many governnent officials are too. The most popular party is the one with these people in. Weird or what? But our guide tells us corruption is rife and they have been in power so long they are not questioned when they do a dodgey deal etc. I digress! The palace was amazing set against a Dali blue sky. The royal yellow was in abundance with beautiful tiled roofs on all the buildings. The king was in as a blue flag was flying but he didn’t pop to see me! We saw the impressive throne room but were not allowed to go in. We could go in the silver pagoda but i was surprised to see it wasn’t silver. I took my shoes off and went in only to realise that the floor tiles are silver, weighing 1kg each apparently! You wouldn’t want to drop your iron on that! They had carpeted over much of it. The Bhudda was green and surrounded by gold ornaments. We had a happy room stop and then went into an exhibition bit where you could see the elephant place ( no elephants now for king to ride on. We saw a mock up of a simple living quarters and then went through a corridor of pictures all about the king since he came onto the throne at 18 years old. Then all aboard the pink bus – yes very pleased it’s pink again! – and off to the museum. Here we saw Gurada the half man half bird god in the entrance standing about 7 foot tall carved from one piece of stone ( don’t know why they say this because by my reckoning if they use several pieces it will fall apart!). Here were lots of old artefacts going back yonks, rescued before they were pilfered and sold abroad. The garden here was very pleasant with Buddha sitting calmly in the middle of 4 ponds. Exhausted in the heat we were taken for lunch at an air conditioned buffet place where you could pretty much anything you wanted of the food here. And here we will have a break and i will finish the day tomorrow. It is 10.45 and i am outside in the garden of the hotel drinking vodka and tonic. Do you know why? NO wake up call, cases out by 12 and we leave the hotel at 1.15!!!
Freejan