A morning at the Royal Palace

The Royal Palace in Phnom Penh opens early which is just as well as there isn't much shade once you pay your 6USD entry fee and walk through the turnstile. The complex, Preah Barom Reachea Vaeng Chaktomuk in Khmer, was constructed nearly a century and a half ago as the residence of the King and his family and as a venue for the ritual symbolism of Cambodia- functions it still serves today. The Royal complex and grounds, surrounded by thick protective walls, consist of several buildings many of which have been replaced and expanded since its original installation opposite a busy riverfront park.

Not much other than distinctive golden Cambodian rooftop silhouettes and the fading painted ceiling of the Chanchhaya Pavillion hint at what lies behind the wall. Inside the noise, dirt and poverty of Cambodia's capital fades and Royal buildings sit like pretty pieces on an orderly chess board surrounded by wide swept paths and clipped, green hedges.


The Palace compound is divided into three main areas separated by more thick walls. The central space is dominated size wise by the Throne Hall but it is another much smaller building that immediately grabs your attention. Most of the buildings of the Royal Palace have distinctive traditional Khmer architectural features. One, however, stands out. A delicate silver dollhouse in a room full of boys toys. Its plaque says, in French, that it was a gift from Napoleon III in 1876 to the then King Norodom.

Originally created for Empress Eugenie to live in during the construction of the Suez Canal the prefabricated pressed iron building was later presented to Norodom and according to smug French Officials of the time it became the Kings favourite residence. They were equally self congratulatory that the doors and windows, which had already been etched with an 'N' for Napoleon, would not have to be replaced for 'N'-orodom.


Today it is rusting quietly in the humidity, it's visable ceilings peeling and cracking and is mostly closed although the guide book says it is used as an art gallery and houses a collection of oil paintings and family photos, some of the Royal wardrobe, a chart of the Royal Family tree, The Preah Moha Mokot Reach (The Great Crown of Victory), The Preah Khan Reach (The Sacred Sword), The Preah Lompeng Chey (The Victory Spear), The Kriss (The Dagger), The Preah Soporbatea (The Slippers) and The Veal Vichani (The Fan)!


Beside Napoleon's elaborate present is the Throne Hall, Preah Thineang Dheva Vinnichay in Khmer, which means 'The sacred seat of judgement'.


It is a huge cross shaped building crowned with three spires the tallest of which is topped with the four faced head of Brahma, the Hindu g-d of creation which you can see reflected in the windows of the Napoleon Pavillion in the first photo of this post. It gives the building an even more storybook like appearance that together with its already whimsical traditional Khmer features make you feel as if you've walked into the pages of a fairytale.


Here is a closer view.

The Royal Throne Hall is still used today, as it always was, for royal and religious ceremonies and as a meeting place for distinguished guests. Inside there is, as one would assume from it's title, a throne (actually two thrones) and a series of busts of past Kings of Cambodia.




On the wall, visible from the road outside, is the statuesque open air Chanchhaya Pavilion, also dreamily known as the 'Moonlight Pavilion', which serves as a venue for rare performances by the Royal dancers and as a platform for the King to address the crowds and watch the races on the river during Water Festival. In typical Cambodian style its ornately decorated ceilings are now faded and peeling, left largely to the elements.

The smaller Pho Chan pavillion has suffered a similar fate.



Two smaller buildings sit either side of the Throne Hall. One was open and had air conditioning, the only building on the compound to be artificially cooled, a welcome respite from the direct morning sun. Inside, in dusty glass cases, is an eclectic collection of Royal curios and Royal outfits.

On the the south-west of the Royal compound the Khemarin Palace, where the current King Shihamoni resides, is off limits to general riffraff and so instead it was through the poetically artistic gates to the Silver Pagoda...



...which isn't Silver at all on the outside but gets it's name from the 5 329 silver tiles, that line the pagoda's floor, protected by carpets. It's proper name is Wat Preah Keo Morokat, which means 'The Temple of the Emerald Buddha,' after the central Green Crystal Buddha perched on a high gilded pedestal with a 90kg life size solid gold Buddha inlaid with 2086 diamonds, including a 25 carat monstrosity. But you are just going to have to take my word for it as, like the Throne Hall, there are no photos allowed inside.


The Silver Pagoda was built, in 1892, as a place inside palace grounds, where royalty could listen to sermons on Ubosoth- the 8 precepts of Buddha; no killing, no stealing, no adultery, no lying or slander, eating must be done at the prescribed times, 'worldly gifts' are to be avoided and the use of ointments is prohibted.

Cambodian Buddhism has changed markedly since then!


The pagoda compound, as a whole, contains several buildings surrounded by a mostly potted garden arranged on very hot reflective concrete. The other structures include a library, concrete moulded stupas or chedi, shrines, a bell tower and the galleries of the Reamker.

M and I walked around the muraled wall in the shade with the added protection of our shared umbrella.


The 604 metre fresco painted by a team of forty artists between 1903 and 1904 and is modelled on the Thai Ramakien murals of their Royal Palace and tell the story of the Reamker the Cambodian version of the Ramayana.

One of the shrines was open and further inspection revealed a rather happy, beautifully silk attired Khmer lady was having her fortune told.



She lit some incense, poked it into the mass of spent sticks in a pot outside and knelt in front of a large mostly silver effigy of Shiva's mount Nandi. The fortune teller handed her a sandlewood book which she held above her head and with eyes squeezed shut poked it's attached peg into the thin engraved pages.


The augur read the resulting fortune and she smiled broadly. By the third reading she was giggling and nodding vigorously.

The four stupas on the grounds are memorials to various Kings and Queens two contain Royal ashes.


It was getting hotter by the minute so we called it a day and retired a block or two down at the road at Cafe 33 for a round of Pink Cows and ice laden lime in tall cool glasses.

The lady of the hill

My sister and her family dropped into Phnom Penh for a few days between Hongkong Disney and the temples of Siem Reap so after a trip to the museum I took them to Wat Phnom somewhere I have driven past often but never actually explored. Wat Phnom, the only hill in town, stands 27 meters above sea level, has it's own legend, smoke stained temple, saddled elephant and band of merry monkeys.

Legend has it that six hundred years ago, when Cambodia was ruled by Kings and temples and was still a powerful and prosperous empire, Old Lady Penh pulled a tree trunk out of the swollen Mekong river. Nestled inside she found five statues of buddha which she carried to the top of a near by hill. The shrine she built to hold them she called Temple of the Hill or Wat Phnom. Wat Phnom has been rebuilt many times over the years but has retained it's status as one of the holiest places in Phnom Penh, the Hill of Lady Penh.

After paying 1USD each, the kids are free, we made our way up the pink naga lined, lion guarded staircase to the landing just under the main temple at the top.

Young entrepreneurs lay in wait with cages full of tiny birds. For another dollar you could set one free. Liberating a trapped animal, a 'good' thing to do, is a way of accumulating Buddhist merit, a credit towards being born in a superior position in the next life. Of course this requires someone to trap the bird first which I imagine does the opposite! The freed birds often do not remain free either. They are frequently recaged ready to help their little 'owner' make another dollar in exchange for a few seeds.

West of the vihara is an enormous bell shaped stupa containing the ashes of King Ponhea Yat who reigned from 1405 to 1467.


In a small pavillion near the door an eclectic shrine to the smiling, plump, bespectacled genie Preah Chau, revered by the Vietnamese, her head backlit by a multicoloured halo.

The smokey vihara, rebuilt in 1434, 1806 , 1894, and most recently, in 1926, houses window sized murals depicting the life of Buddha.


The ceiling too is painted but years of incense and candle smoke has dulled the colours making them difficult to see in the dim light.

Wooden monks in brown robes sit cross legged around the central buddha a lotus bud and riel note in their laps.


Today, many people come here to pray for good luck and success in lives much harder than that of lady Penh. When their hopes are granted they return with offerings; garlands of flowers, bunches of mauve and cream lotus buds, fruit or riel pledged when wishes were made.

Back at the bottom of the hill Sambo, Phnom Penh's resident elephant, waits patiently for her next rider.

But the kids were hot and hungry so we called it a day and went back to the cool of their hotel pool.

Something unimaginable

The beautiful south coast of Samoa.

I woke this morning to the news of a tsunami, triggered by an 8.3 earthquake, in Samoa. My heart leapt, hands began to shake and tears blurred vision as I pushed the on button on the computer.

As some of you know Samoa was our first expat posting and one we all found very hard to leave. We still have friends we keep regular contact with on the islands, our email address remains 'gone2samoa' and I still think of its aqua blue seas, picturesque bent palms and smiling people on a daily basis. Googling news websites offered only patchy information so I wrote messages on peoples facebook pages in the hope at least someone would still have access. As the day has gone by I am slowly hearing from people and piecing news together thanks to the internet. As news sites and the BBC get pictures and reports the death toll rises. Stories of survival and heroic acts remind me of Aceh January 2004. It has been 5 and a half years and fishermen still refuse to go into the water, people are still in recovery- will Samoa be the same.

The well established tsunami warning system apparently triggered as it was supposed to but the earthquake was too close. The wave energy, created by the strong tremor, travels at several hundred kilometers an hour. Four huge waves reached the shore in minutes. Samoan villages sit right on the water with often only a paved road and a string of palm trees between fales and the sea, many people just could not get away in time.

On the two islands of Samoa, Savai'i and Upolu, 140 people have been convirmed dead, up to 15000 people have been made homeless and 50 villages along the south and south east coasts have been reduced to rubble.


Beach fales on the south coast of Samoa


The pier at Sinalei



(photo from stuff.co.nz)

A story about a googol

In 1996, in Room 360 of the Gates CS Building at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were sharing their work space with other graduates, began calling their brand new search engine 'BackRub' inspired by the way it used the webs 'back links'. A year later when 'BackRub' was actually starting to look like something effective and sophisticated enough to share with the general public, a brainstorming session was called and 'googolplex' was suggested. A 'googol' is the name given to 10 to the power of 100. A 'googolplex' is 10 to the power of 'googol' or 1o to the power of in brackets 10 to the power of 100.

Are you still with me?


Mathmatician Edward Kasner's nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta suggested the term 'googolplex' to describe the number '1 followed by as many zeros as you can write until you get too tired to write any more'. His father, being a mathmatician and therefore prone to specifics, proposed the more formal definition. Milton's picture of a number so big it you run out of energy before you finish writing it- and so big there is not enough physical space in the universe to actually write it- is exactly what Page and Brin, the inventors of 'Google' (Larry Page wasn't the best speller) were looking for.

Google - a search engine big enough to be able to index an amount of data so big it makes you tired just thinking about it.

On September the 15th 1997 the name 'google.com' became a registered domain name.

Do you Google?

The hard questions

I love this. The reactions are just priceless...

The view from Phnom Chisor

We were in the car and out of town on National Highway No 2 before 8am on Sunday morning. It was P'chum Ben and a long holiday weekend so traffic was relatively light and it was a quick 45 minutes before we turned off onto a dirt road that headed straight towards a looming 'phnom' (hill) between rice paddys. We bumped laboriously along the road slowing to pass riel notes to sets of small children who raced from under the shade of trees to dump hoe lots of dirt into ruts and puddles to 'smooth' our way.

The bottom of the 500 or so steps to the temple on the top of Chisor is marked by platformed shacks stocked with bottles of water, cans of syrupy soft drink, a variety of barbequed titbits and -bizzarely I thought- chewing gum. Most of the evidence of the gum scattered around the path and through the surrounding trees was the distinctive green Wrigglys wrapper and it's silver backed lining and not the chewed part. Do Cambodians swallow the actual gum?

Like Odong the top of the Phnom is reached by climbing about 500 steps under the dappled shade of the hills trees. Less touristy than Odong, the climb up Chisor could be made without the constant chatter of Cambodia's youngest members of the workforce as they padded up beside you 'guiding' for 'one dollar'. There were, however, a few kids at odd intervals who stuck out their little hands and said simply, 'sumoney' - which I would have gladly given had they picked up some of the rubbish that carpeted the forest floor. We handed a dollar instead to a blind man sitting cross legged and chanting under a canopy about halfway up the steps.


Arrival at the top of Phnom Chisor came without fanfare, the steps just stopped on a flat stretch, the view obscured by trees. This was not, it seemed, quite the top. To the left, on a knoll, was a small wat with story painted walls. We took our shoes off and walked around the veranda drinking in the breeze and finally a view but still couldn't see Phnom Chisor's ancient temple.

'Look more stairs', I nudged.

We backtracked the few steps to the top of the original climb and, after paying our $2USD each, collected a 'Visitting ticket for foreigner'.

'Takeo tourism office would like to thank you the customer your support for the maintaining PHNOM CHISO site and take care for sanitation environment'.



The stairs to the left of the ticket seller led to another little sanctuary, a stupa and a flat cleared area with a large ceremonial pool filled with green opaque water(in the foreground of the picture above), a small shrine containing a concrete boy and his cow, a gold painted statue a typically Khmer style roof protecting it from the hot sun and a small round empty pool containing two entwined concrete hooded naga (just seen in the far right of the photo). It has been pretty difficult to find out anything about these particular structures.


Here is the boy and his cow, Prasat Preah Ko Preah Kaew, who were according to one legend the off spring of a woman who gave birth to them after she fell out of a mango tree presumably in the area.

The many shrines or spirit houses, called Neak Ta, that you see around temple compounds, in fields and in villages, are not strictly a part of Buddhism but rather animist beliefs that have become so intwined with Cambodian Buddhist beliefs the result often resembles a new kind of Buddhism. The rituals and practises surrounding P'chum Ben, for example, are not all Buddhist but take place in the grounds of the wat under the guidance of the monks.



This Neak Ta was within the crumbling ancient temple walls of Phnom Chisor's 11th century temple. The shrines of Neak Ta contain at least one statue- the words 'neak ta' mean an old man- as well as other objects that represent land, water and spirit elements such as incense. Some even have carved bits of one of Cambodia's many ancient temple ruins. People visit these places with a mixture of fear and reverence to make offerings to ask for protection and good luck.

Originally known as Sun Mountain, Suryadri, (or Suryagiri) Phnom Chisor was used in the eleventh century by Suryavarman I to build Prasat Boran to house one of four sacred linga he installed at temples on the boundaries of his kingdom. Constructed of pitted but eternally durable laterite, bricks and the more readily carvable sandstone for lintels the temple stands on the eastern most side of the 'mountain'.



It's partially ruined walls dotted with large square windows and gopuras surround a two and a half meter wide gallery which houses a variety of sanctuaries and parts of now decayed structures.


The inside like many of the other structures on Phnom Chisor were decorated for P'chum Ben with gold paper and fabric banners and pendants.


Sadly the inner courtyard smelled like a public toilet in a rarely used railway station and watching where one placed their foot was all too necessary. The reason for the 'sanitation' message on the ticket was immediately and consistently evident although I doubt it was the 'foreigners' who were responsible for the desecration of a still sacred site.




The double east wall has a gopura (gate or doorway) and two gate houses leading out onto a gloriously unobscurred view across the green (it's the rainy season) plains of Cambodia and onwards to the boarder with Vietnam.


At the bottom of the steep steps is a sacred pool, Tonl Om and two other temples. The closer and more wrecked Sen Thmol and even further to the east, Sen Ravang.



During rituals held here nine hundred years ago the King his brahmans and entourage would approach Prasat Boran, on top of the phnom, using these much more precipitous steps rather than the more gentle approach taken by most of todays visitors facing west- the direction of Angkor Wat.


Phnom Chisor was teemimg with people, mostly local Khmer, thanks to the holiday but it is also a modern Buddhist compound complete with monks quarters and a school classroom. We bought some 'vi', pronounced 'vee' (the Samoan name- I can never remember what the Cambodian word for them is), like a hard green pear, which the woman skined and scored to make easier to eat and strolled around the rest of the compound.


Past a doorway neatly laid with shoes of the faithful who were being blessed in quiet rhythmic tones inside...


... and the monks quarters.


A reclining new Buddha watched over by a nun in white and a gold painted Buddha sitting on a naga in the middle of a lotus pond.


We made our way back down the steps to the car in the now much hotter midday sun thankful we had made the early morning start.