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Updated: May 4, 2025
But all that is most worth seeing in Pnom-Penh is cloistered within the mysterious walls of vivid pink which surround the Royal Palace.
At Batavia we would have no difficulty in getting a steamer for Singapore, and from there we could go overland by the new Federated Malay States Railway, through Johore and Malacca and Kuala Lumpur, to Siam, where the cats and the twins and the white elephants come from. From Bangkok we might take a short-cut through the Cambodian jungle, by elephant, to Pnom-Penh and "
The alternative route, which is far more interesting, consists in descending the river to Banam, a village some twenty miles below Pnom-Penh, on the opposite bank of the Mekong, where, if a car has been arranged for, it is possible to motor across the fertile plains of Cochin-China to Saigon in a single day. That was the way that we went.
I had looked forward to covering the first stage of this journey, the four hundred-odd miles of jungle which separate Bangkok, in Siam, from Pnom-Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on an elephant. Everyone with whom I had discussed the matter in Singapore had assured me that this was perfectly feasible. And as a means of transportation it appealed to me.
As the road to Pnom-Penh is quite uninteresting just a narrow yellow highway chopped through a dense tangle of tropic vegetation suppose I take advantage of the opportunity to tell you something of this little-known land in which we find ourselves. French Indo-China occupies perhaps two-thirds of that great bay-window-shaped peninsula which protrudes from the southeastern corner of Asia.
Twice during the journey to Pnom-Penh I saw tracks of elephant herds on the road it looked as though a fleet of whippet tanks had passed. Nevertheless, I should have put mental question-marks after some of the big game stories I heard while I was in Indo-China had I not been convinced of the credibility of those who told them.
Pnom-Penh possesses a spacious and well ventilated motion-picture house, where Charlie Chaplin known to the French as "Charlot" and Fatty Arbuckle convulse the simple children of the jungle just as they convulse more sophisticated assemblages on the other side of the globe.
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