Phnom Penh is named after the city’s most famous Wat, Wat Phnom which was in turned named after Daun Penh, a widow who it is claimed found four Buddha statues washed up on the banks of the Mekong and constructed a temple upon the hill now known as Wat Phnom. The city then grew from there and became the capital in 1866.

During the reign of the Khmer Rouge the civilian population was forces out of the city and into forced labor camps, it was during this time that S21 and the Killing Fields came about.

Phnom Penh sometimes gets a bad wrap for it’s touts, beggars and lack of public infrastructure but people well traveled in South East Asia and developing countries will find that Cambodian touts are far less abrupt and less persistent than many of their neighbors. While the beggars and rubbish are simply a sad reality of much of the developing world, it would be a great loss to avoid Cambodia because of it.

The system of using numbers for street names makes navigation quite easy for foreigners with even numbers running east to west getting higher as you go south and odd numbers run north to south getting higher as you head west. There are a few major roads that are named but there aren’t generally french names which makes pronouncing and recalling them a bit easier.

Phnom Penh has a imperfect beauty about it, ghosts and reminders of it’s past seem just under the surface but in plain sight.