phnom penh

Whenever you’re traveling to a foreign country, one of the important matters to figure out before the trip is whether you need to obtain a visa to visit the country. This regulation varies country by country, and also it depends on your country of citizenship as well. If you find out that a visa is required, you also need to figure out where to get the visa from and when you need to apply for it — in some countries, this might be a lengthy and involved process that you need to allow enough time in advance before your trip to ensure you have the visa before you go.

To visit Cambodia, most visitors would need to obtain visa from the Cambodian government. They actually have an online site that allows you to obtain the visa conveniently over the Internet. All you need is your valid passport, your digital photo, and a credit card. Very convenient — you just need to make sure you get it close enough to your trip date because the visa is only valid for three months after the issuance. Alternatively, you can also get the visa on arrival. You just need to bring some passport photos that they will collect when you apply for the visa upon your arrival in Cambodia.

When my cousin Kristi and I traveled to Cambodia, we arrived without having the visa already requested because some information we found online indicated that because we’re Indonesian citizens, we wouldn’t need to get visas because there is agreement between the Cambodian government and other ASEAN countries including Indonesia (we knew that was the case for the other countries we visited: Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore). But we thought to be safe we should still take a couple of passport photos just in case we had incorrect information.

When we arrived in Phnom Penh, we followed other foreigners from our flight from Bangkok to go through the immigration area. Most people who were requesting visa on arrival went straight to the long line to submit their paperwork. We went towards an immigration officer to ask if we needed to get visas. His English wasn’t that good, but after looking at our passports, he pointed us towards the officer who would check the passport and register our visit. We proceeded to that line, only to find out that apparently at that time Indonesian citizens could come without visa, but only for diplomatic purposes, not for tourism. So we had to go back to the end of the line to request for visa on arrival. The process itself was pretty expedient, though it was interesting that after we submitted our passport, paperwork, and photos, they told us to proceed to the next window where everyone else waited, and one by one the officer would call out your name for you to pay and pick up your passport with the visa. So it was interesting to observe and listen to other people getting called out — by the end we kind of learned other passengers’ names…

The photo below was the visa page of my passport after the visit. One thing that was interesting, the Cambodians typically write their names as [surname] [given name], in different order compared to typical Western names ([given name] [surname]). So when I got my passport back, the name written on the visa for me was my given name in the place where it’s supposed to be the surname.

Phnom Penh is the capital city and the largest city by population in Cambodia. Situated on the banks of the Mekong River, Phnom Penh has been a capital city since the time when Cambodia was a French colony. During the 1920s, Phnom Penh was known as ‘the Pearl of Asia’ with its many French colonial buildings and boulevards. Similar to Bangkok, the city is also the site for the Royal Palace for the Kingdom of Cambodia. The Royal Palace complex includes the Silver Pagoda, a temple covered with silver tiles and now houses many precious Buddha statues that are the national treasure of the Kingdom.

The city went through a dark period in its history during the Vietnam War, as it was used as a base by the many sides involved in the conflict (Northern Vietnamese / the Viet Cong, then the South Vietnamese and its allies, and later the Khmer Rouge). The darkest part of its history was when it fell under the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975. Most of its population of 3 million people at that time was ‘evacuated’ out to the Cambodian country side by the Khmer Rouge, and one of the city’s public schools was turned into a prison called S-21 or Tuol Sleng. During the four years that the Khmer Rouge was in power, 21,000 people were imprisoned there, and only seven came out alive. Many were taken and killed in a place outside Phnom Penh called Choeung Ek (aka The Killing Fields).

When we were planning our trip in Southeast Asia, one of the places we wanted to visit was the Angkor Wat, which is located near Siem Reap. We were not thinking about going to Phnom Penh, until I started reading about the history of Cambodia. If the Angkor Wat represents the highest point in the history of the Khmer people, the Khmer Rouge genocide represents the lowest point. The reality is that both of these were parts of the history that made the people who they are and where they are now. So we thought visiting only Siem Reap and Angkor Wat would not give us a complete picture if we really wanted to appreciate this country and its people.

So we decided to spend our first couple of days in Cambodia in Phnom Penh, and we specifically planned to visit sites that would give us a good overview of Cambodian history: the Palace and the Silver Pagoda, the National Museum of History, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields. I had never been to any ‘dark tourism’ sites like concentration camps or even Holocaust Museums, so I didn’t have anything to compare this to as preparation. What I did know was that this one day in Phnom Penh could be the most emotionally exhausting day of our trip. But I thought it was essential to do it so we get better understanding about what the people of Cambodia had gone through in the last few decades.

The photo below was taken from the passenger seat of our hired car on the way from the Phnom Penh International Airport a little outside of the city to our hotel inside the city. The drive through the outskirt of Phnom Penh felt like driving through a provincial town in Indonesia. You could tell that new, modern influences had started to come in, but it was largely looking like what Bangkok or Jakarta would look like 20 years ago.