Day 76, in which we go to see the king

After a stroll along the river - which close-to turned out to be little more than a giant concrete gutter seasoned in garbage - we started the day with lunch at the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) bar, a long-standing institution of Phnom Penh which – during our visit at least – saw large numbers of western tourists pass through its doors in search of a bubble of civility away from the noisy streets outside. The restaurant bar sits on the second floor of a charmingly ramshackle colonial building, the terrace to the east overlooking the river and to the west looking out across a park to the lovely red National Museum. It's one of those extremely rare spots in the city where everything looks really quite fabulous, and we reclined in big leather arm chairs and ate fish and chips to celebrate.

Topped up with energy we were finally ready again to face the challenges of being a tourist in Phnom Penh. The capital goes one better than Siem Reap as there are four things for tourists to do here. Having already been to the National Museum – and having taken a tactical decision not to tour the Killing Fields or visit the army base in order to fire a machine gun – we were left today with visiting the Royal Palace.

It was, unsurprisingly, baking hot and queueing for tickets just to enter was a trial in itself, with sweating tourists taking it in turns to step out of the queue into the shadows for some brief respite. It's only five degrees hotter here than Bangkok, but it's five degrees which pushes you from 'slightly cooler than core body temperature' to 'significantly more' and for this reason, I think we got less out of our visit to the Royal Palace than we have many other sights during our trip. But still, it was interesting to see the long Throne Room where King Cambodian gets to sit, and the treasury where he keeps what appeared to be a series of old pots and plates, and the so-called Silver Pagoda, which isn't silver at all but which does have a floor made entirely from silver tiles (an expensive affectation in such a poor country, and not a practical one either. The tiles were held together with the wider kind of cellotape).

Our favourite part of the visit was the tower above the Throne Room, which has four faces around the top and looked like a palatial version of Thomas the Tank Engine. I also really liked a cast iron building which apparently Napoleon III had posted over to Cambodia as a gift, but it was currently undergoing renovation and sheathed in green tarpaulin. We otherwise took polite photos and enjoyed the scenery, but didn't hang about in getting home to the air conditioning.

During dinner in the super little Italian Pop Café the weather finally changed and the skies opened, drenching the streets in rain. The sewers here are non-fabulous, and the gutters quickly flooded, lifting rubbish from the ground to form rather jolly flotillas of disease.