Walk Phnom Penh with FOG

Phnom Penh is flat, hot and numbered, and walking it takes more commitment than most cities. FOG makes the effort visible.

Numbers instead of names

The centre of Phnom Penh was laid out by the French, and most of its streets have numbers rather than names. Broadly, the odd numbers run north to south and the even numbers run east to west, which sounds like a gift to a walker and mostly is, though the sequence jumps and doubles back in places and the numbering is not as reliable as it first looks.

Over the top of that grid sit the big named boulevards. Monivong runs north to south through the commercial middle, Norodom parallel to the east, and Sihanouk cuts across them past the Independence Monument. Sisowath Quay follows the water. Learn those four and you can place any numbered street between them without thinking.

Four faces of water

The city sits at the confluence the Khmer name Chaktomuk describes: the Mekong, the Tonle Sap and the Bassac meeting in front of the Royal Palace. The riverfront promenade along Sisowath Quay is the one continuous walking corridor in the city, a couple of kilometres of open paving with the water on one side and cafes on the other. It fills with people at dusk and it is the easiest fog you will clear here.

The obvious afternoon is short and dense. Start at Wat Phnom, the small hill the city is named after, walk south down the quay past the Foreign Correspondents' corner, take in the Royal Palace and the National Museum, then cut inland along Street 240 to Norodom and finish at the Independence Monument. Two or three hours, and it lights the whole historic core.

Districts that reward a second trip

Daun Penh covers the old colonial quarter and the palace. South of it, Boeung Keng Kang, universally called BKK1, is leafier, with wide shaded streets and the best pavements in the city. Further south again, Toul Tom Poung wraps around the Russian Market, and the lanes there are tight, busy and genuinely worth an hour of aimless turning.

North and west, Toul Kork is quieter and more residential, and the city then spreads outward into new development along the ring roads. The Central Market with its ochre art deco dome sits in the middle of everything as a landmark you can navigate off. None of these areas are large, so each one closes a decent block of fog in a single visit.

Heat, pavements and traffic

Be honest about the conditions. It is thirty degrees or more nearly every day, humid with it, and the monsoon from roughly May to October brings hard afternoon rain that floods streets fast. The comfortable windows are early morning and after sunset, and the cool dry months around December and January are when serious walking is realistic.

The other issue is the pavement, which is usually occupied by parked motorbikes, tables or merchandise. In practice you walk in the road, alongside heavy motorbike traffic, and crossing a boulevard is a matter of moving slowly and predictably rather than waiting for a gap. Nothing here troubles the GPS, the buildings are low and the tracks come out clean. Background exploring keeps recording with the phone in a pocket, which is where you want it in this heat anyway.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

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