From a very, very gold temple to smoky tofu skin workshops and traditional silk looms, a Vespa tour from Phnom Penh to Silk Island turns into one seriously fun Cambodian adventure.

If my teenager loved exploring Phnom Penh by tuk-tuk, he’s completely smitten with it from the back of a Vespa. He’s on the back of his before I’ve even worked out where to put my feet, and by the first corner he’s leaning into the turns like he was born doing it, grinning at the traffic as if it’s been laid on for him as some kind of challenge.

Our guide, Tin Tin, is grinning too. I suspect he’s seen this reaction before.

We’re on a Silk Island tour, organised by our fab friends at InsideAsia, heading out of Phnom Penh on the back of a scooter and into the countryside.

It’s a first for both of us. Not just the destination, but the scooters. Though I must say that at this point one of us is a little nervous and double-checking the travel insurance covers such activities. The other is stupidly excited. I’ll leave it to you to guess which is which.

Mongkol Serey Temple is very, very gold

Before we hit the island, we stop at Mongkol Serey Temple, better known as the Golden Temple. It is, unsurprisingly, gold. Very, very gold. The site actually has two temples. An older one dating back around 200 years and the much newer golden pagoda, which is still being completed. It’s also an active Buddhist temple and place of learning, with monks living on the grounds. Did I mention it is gold?

The sun hits all those ornate carvings and figures and bounces straight back off them, so the whole place looks like it’s lit from the inside. Our guide walks us through it, filling us in on the stories painted across the walls and explaining the rituals going on around us as we go. Saffron-robed monks drift quietly across the grounds, filled with statues and gorgeous gardens, and locals stop to pray and leave offerings.

Before we leave, one of the monks offers us a blessing with holy water. Of course we acquiesce. We’re becoming addicted to all the good luck and spiritual protection being slathered upon us on our way. I’m expecting a polite sprinkle. Instead, we receive a proper drenching… via bucket. We’re drenched. The monk is delighted.

Then it’s back to the Vespas, slightly soggy, and onwards to the river.

Crossing the Mekong

We ride onto the car ferry and chug across the Mekong to Koh Dach, AKA Silk Island. The island is a rural community known for its traditional silk weaving, with the craft passed down through generations. Much of the weaving is done by women, often alongside other work and family responsibilities, making silk an important part of the island’s local economy and identity.

Once we roar (and by ‘roar’ I mean splutter… Vespas are hardly exactly MotoGP contenders) off the car ferry and head onto the island proper, the traffic thins, the roads narrow and concrete gives way to palms, farms and arms waving from scooters as we ride between villages and fields. At one point a voice screams over the engines. “This is awesome!”

Yeah, that was me.

We stop for a coconut, because obviously we do. There’s something deeply satisfying about sitting in the shade with a cold coconut after bouncing around on a Vespa, watching village life and a bunch of random chickens carry on around us before climbing back on the bikes.

Smoke, soy and tofu skin

We pop into a tofu skin factory, and it’s nothing like I imagined. It’s dark and smoky inside, the air thick with woodsmoke from the fires burning under long rows of steaming vats of soy milk. As the milk heats, a thin skin forms on the surface, and the workers lift each sheet off with a stick and drape it over a line to dry, then do it again, and again, and again. My eyes are streaming within minutes, and I can’t imagine doing it all day in this heat.

The tofu skin, also known as yuba, is made by hand from soy milk. There’s something almost hypnotic about watching the workers repeat the same careful movements, lifting each delicate sheet before it tears and laying it out to dry. What looks simple from the outside is hot, smoky, repetitive work, and we don’t stay long before the smoke has us blinking our way back outside.

Then it’s back on our bikes to discover the silk the island is named for.

From silkworm to silk

At a women-led weaving centre, we get the whole story, from the silkworms munching away to the spinning, the dyeing and finally the looms. Raff has questions. So many questions.

How long does it take to make a metre of fabric? How many hours does someone sit at that loom each day? How long does one scarf take? How much silk comes from one cocoon? The answer is hundreds of metres of continuous silk thread. I love this stuff, and I’m impressed my boy does too.

There is a reason women feature so heavily in the island’s weaving tradition. The craft has traditionally been passed down within families, with women weaving from home and contributing to household income alongside other work. Today, community-based weaving centres also give women opportunities to earn from their skills and sell their work directly to visitors.

We enjoy fruit and snacks with the weavers, and there is time to look properly at the finished silk rather than simply being marched past it. What really gets me is how he is with the people. He’s genuinely in awe of how much skill goes into every piece and how an entire village makes its living this way, one thread at a time. He asks the weaver’s name, thanks everyone and, before we leave, buys a silk scarf for his girlfriend. He’s so quietly, completely respectful about the whole thing that I need to look away for a second so he doesn’t catch me getting misty.

By the time we hop off the Vespas back in Phnom Penh, he’s gone from sizing up silk scarves to pricing up scooters. I give him the look every mother gives when her child mentions a motorbike.

I don’t tell him I’m thinking about how much it would cost to get one too to gad about the neighbourhood on.

Back through Phnom Penh

The ride back takes us back across the river on the car ferry, past the Royal Palace and straight into the city’s afternoon chaos, with traffic weaving around us and people setting up for a festival.

Music and voices spill into the streets, scooters buzz past, and the whole city seems to be moving at once. The wind is whipping through my hair, which by now is a single dreadlock, but I don’t care. I feel amazing, and we’re both beaming as we weave our way back through it all and back to our hotel after an awesome day on two wheels.

Looking for more Cambodian info and inspiration? We’ve got you

Phnom Penh: What to Eat, See and Do in Cambodia’s Capital
What to Expect from Cambodian Cuisine 
Lum Orng: Siem Reap’s Unmissable Farm-to-Table Feast
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The post Silk Island by Vespa: Exploring Koh Dach from Phnom Penh appeared first on boyeatsworld.

Phnom Penh by night © Aleney de Winter

From brilliant street food and rooftop bars to temples, the riverside and Cambodia’s confronting recent history, here’s how to eat, explore and experience Phnom Penh.

Phnom Penh hits me with a bit of a jolt. I’ve been before, but not for 19 years, and I barely recognise it. I remember a smaller, scruffier city. Now skyscrapers and hotels with rooftop bars crowd the skyline.

Scooters zip in every direction, tuk-tuks weave through the traffic and markets, cafés and tiny shops seem to fill every available gap. The city appears to operate according to a set of rules everyone understands except me.

Raff, on his first visit, is immediately smitten by its relentless buzz.

What and where to eat in Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh Food Tour © Aleney de Winter

The food in Cambodia is excellent, but in a city sprawling, knowing where to go, what to order and which unassuming little shop is actually worth stopping for isn’t always obvious. Which is where a food tour comes in handy.

Happily on arrival in the city, we’re met by our local Inside Asia guide who takes us by remork (tuk tuk) on a city tasting tour, bouncing past the glittering Royal Palace before slipping down a side street and stopping for a snack of dried beef and buffalo meat, the chewy, peppery sort of Cambodian beer snack that seems specifically designed to make you order another beer.

We head to Toul Tom Poung, better known as the Russian Market. Buckets of lotus flowers nestle alongside piles of fresh fruit and vegetables, and giant durian stinks things up delightfully. There are eels wriggling in tubs, strange fish flapping about, chickens hanging ready for the cooking pot, dried meats piled up in rows, squid curling and crackling on the grill while unidentifiable things sizzling away over hotplates.

We slip into a tiny doorway, then squeeze up a narrow set of stairs, the doorways so low we have to duck and bump our heads more than once on the way up, until we reach a rooftop bar overlooking the colourful patchwork of market roofs below. Settling in with a couple of drinks, the city starts to change around us. The humidity eases, lights flicker on below, and the setting sun turns the rooftops gold.

We head back down into Toul Tom Poung Street Market for dinner. And this is where our InsideAsia guide really earns her keep. She takes us to a tiny noodle stall for lort cha, fat little noodles that look like a pile of worms. The beef is chopped and sizzling on the hotplate in front of us, then the noodles go in, followed by bean sprouts, chives and all the good smoky, salty stuff. Everything is tossed together until it’s sizzling and slightly caramelised, then topped with an egg. It is bloody delicious. Exactly the sort of thing we would have walked straight past without her.

The eating continues at Nesat, a brilliant seafood restaurant supporting local women, where we settle in for a proper feast of pipis in tamarind, prawns with pomelo and a fragrant fish curry.

 Phnom Penh Riverside

Phnom Penh riverside © Aleney de Winter

Afterwards, we wander the waterfront sharing headphones and listening to Cambodian surf rock. Yes, that’s a thing.

The riverside is buzzing by then, with couples sitting along the water and vendors doing a roaring trade in snacks. Scooters thread through the traffic and, as the heat finally starts to ease, the whole waterfront feels like one giant neighbourhood hangout.

It’s one of those ordinary moments that somehow becomes one of my favourites.

Just the two of us, wandering the wonderfully whacky streets of Phnom Penh, as scooters zip past, couples stroll along the river and the city glows around us as the evening rolls on. There’s nothing to tick off or learn. We’re just walking, listening and dancing, and for a few minutes I get to hang out with the kid I’ve known all his life as the almost-grown-up person he’s become.

I really like him.

Silk Island by Vespa

The next morning, Raff is ready to swap four wheels for two.

He’s on the back of his Vespa before I’ve even worked out where to put my feet, and by the first corner he’s leaning into the turns like he was born doing it, grinning at the traffic as if it’s all been laid on for him.

We spend the morning riding out to Silk Island, crossing the Mekong and swapping the traffic and skyscrapers of Phnom Penh for quiet roads, villages, rice fields and silk farms. It’s a brilliant way to see a completely different side of the capital. I’ve written more about our Silk Island Vespa adventure here.

Back in Phnom Penh, we head into the city to explore some of its best-known sights.

Other things to see in Phnom Penh 

Royal Palace Phnom Penh at night © Aleney de Winter

Phnom Penh can feel like a lot at first, with its tangle of traffic, tuk-tuks and street stalls, but in between the chaos are some properly spectacular sights. A handful of them are clustered close together near the riverfront, which makes it easy to string together a day of gilded palaces, ancient treasures and hilltop temples without spending half of it in traffic. These are the ones we think are worth carving out time for.

Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda

There’s plenty to see in the city. The Royal Palace is impossible to miss, sprawled along the riverfront in a riot of elaborate tiered roofs, golden spires and gardens so manicured I suspect someone goes over them with nail scissors. It dates back to 1866 and is still home to Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihamoni. Tucked inside the impressive grounds are the grand Throne Hall and the Silver Pagoda, which gets its name from the more than 5,000 silver tiles covering its floor. After Mongkol Serey, I thought we’d hit peak gilding. The palace is packing next-level bling.

National Museum of Cambodia

Just up the road is the National Museum, and it’s one of the highlights of the city. The building alone is gorgeous, all terracotta rooftops wrapped around a courtyard of luscious lotus ponds. But for once the old cliché holds up. Here, it really is what’s inside that counts.

This staggering museum is home to the world’s largest collection of Khmer art, and after days of wandering temples where so much has been worn away, looted or lost, it’s extraordinary to finally see what once filled them. Graceful gods and goddesses, a towering eight-armed Vishnu, delicate bronzes and centuries of treasures, many of them rescued from the very temples we’ve just been scrambling around.

Some pieces have only recently made it back home to Cambodia, including 74 important artifacts returned to Cambodia earlier this year from the collection of Douglas Latchford, a British collector who may not have personally chiselled them off the temples but is widely accused of being the man at the top of the chain. Not that he was the first or the last. Over the years Cambodia’s treasures have been nicked by a parade of colonial-era douchebags and sleazy dealers who clearly never got the memo that you can’t just pop a god in your handbag because it will look nice in the conservatory. Anyway, though it may have taken a while, it’s lovely to see them back where they belong.

Come back to the museum after dark, and the museum gardens turn into an open-air theatre, where young performers from Cambodian Living Arts put on shows of traditional dance, music and theatre. It’s gorgeous, all glittering costumes, intricate music and impossibly graceful hands. But what’s more important to me is what’s happening underneath the spectacle. The Khmer Rouge came terrifyingly close to wiping out Cambodia’s classical arts, and now a new generation is reclaiming them, learning the old forms, performing them and turning that heritage into a living career. Which makes me very happy indeed.

Wat Phnom

Wat Phnom is another must-see. Sitting on a leafy little hill in the middle of the city, it’s the temple that gave Phnom Penh its name. Legend has it that a wealthy widow named Daun Penh fished a floating tree out of the river and found Buddha statues tucked inside, so she had a hill built to house them. It’s still very much in use, with locals popping in to pray, leave offerings and ask for a bit of good luck on the way to wherever they’re going.

The temple itself is colourful and atmospheric, with nagas curling along the stairway and monkeys occasionally making themselves at home among the trees. It’s also a lovely little pocket of calm when the traffic outside starts to feel like hard work.

Markets in Phnom Penh 

Phnom Penh’s Russian Market © Aleney de Winter

Central Market

Central Market, or Phsar Thmei, is one of Phnom Penh’s most recognisable landmarks and a brilliant place to get happily lost. The building alone is worth the trip, a huge Art Deco number from the 1930s with a big yellow dome and four wings sprawling out like a giant cross. It looks more like a spaceship that’s parked itself in the middle of the city than somewhere to buy your bananas.

Inside it’s a glorious jumble of fresh produce, seafood, clothes, jewellery, souvenirs and electronics, plus the usual assortment of things you didn’t know you needed until they were right in front of you. Gem sellers and gold traders hold court under the central dome, while the fresh food section is a feast for the senses, with piles of tropical fruit, mountains of dried fish and vendors cooking up snacks for hungry shoppers. It’s the kind of place where you go in for one thing and come out an hour later with three things you can’t quite explain.

Go early in the day when the market is at its liveliest and before the Phnom Penh heat turns browsing into an endurance sport.

Russian Market

Russian Market, or Tuol Tom Poung Market, is smaller, scruffier and considerably more chaotic than Central Market, which is precisely why I like it. The narrow lanes are packed with clothes, handicrafts, jewellery, souvenirs, household goods and food, with barely enough room to squeeze past the other shoppers. It’s also a good place to look for Cambodian-made crafts and gifts, although you’ll need to rummage a little. The food section is where things get particularly interesting, with fresh produce, noodles and plenty of things that look considerably more mysterious than they are (mostly). The name dates back to the 1980s, when Russian expatriates living in Phnom Penh were among the market’s regular customers. These days it’s firmly Cambodian and one of the city’s best places to practise buying things you didn’t know you wanted.

Orussey Market

If you want to see a more local side of Phnom Penh, head to Orussey Market. It’s a huge multi-level market where locals come to buy everything from clothes and kitchenware to fresh food and household essentials, rather than somewhere primarily aimed at tourists. It’s not polished and it isn’t particularly easy to navigate, but that’s part of the fun. The stalls spill through narrow aisles and up multiple floors, and there’s a wonderful sense that you’ve wandered into the city’s everyday shopping life rather than an attraction designed for visitors.

Confronting Cambodia’s Darkest History

But there’s one place in Phnom Penh Raff has been waiting years to see, and it’s not one either of us is looking forward to.

It’s worth understanding a little of what happened in Cambodia before visiting the places that bear witness to it. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh and emptied the city, forcing its residents into the countryside and dismantling almost every part of ordinary life. Over the next four years, an estimated 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians died through execution, starvation, forced labour and disease.

The regime targeted anyone it considered a threat, including teachers, doctors, monks, former government officials and people accused of being intellectuals. Families were separated, religion was suppressed, and even wearing glasses could be enough to attract suspicion.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Raff has been obsessed with Cambodia for years. He fell for the country when he was a little kid and never really got over it, encouraged by a mother who is equally obsessed. It’s been his go-to subject for just about every history project he’s done in high school, and he now knows an alarming amount about it, including the darkest chapter of its history. He can tell you how the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh in April 1975, emptied the city within days and declared it Year Zero, and how, in less than four years, an estimated 1.7 to 2 million people died from execution, starvation, forced labour and disease. He knows the regime went after teachers, doctors, monks and anyone deemed an intellectual, sometimes simply for wearing glasses. And he knows that Tuol Sleng was a high school before it became S-21, where somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 people were imprisoned, photographed and tortured into false confessions. Many died inside its walls, and the rest executed in the killing fields at Choeung Ek. Only a handful survived.

He needed to come here. But there’s a big difference between writing about a place and walking into it, and I watch that difference land on him the moment we step inside Tuol Sleng. These aren’t stories in a history book anymore. They’re real rooms with real walls, photographs of the people who were imprisoned here staring back at us and the same floor beneath our feet where they once stood. He goes very quiet as we move from room to room, his face ashen. I don’t say anything. I just stay close.

When we exit Tuol Sleng, Phnom Penh is carrying on as if nothing has happened. Scooters stream past, cafés are filling up and the whole city is getting on with the messy, noisy business of being alive. It’s a jolt after where we’ve just been, but it’s also, in its way, the point. The past hasn’t gone anywhere in this city. It’s just that everything that’s come since has kept on living right alongside it.

The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, Phnom Penh

I’ve visited the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek before, so I know what waits there. About 15 kilometres south of Phnom Penh, Choeung Ek was one of the execution and burial sites used by the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of prisoners from S-21 were transported here after being tortured and forced to make false confessions.

Today, the former killing field is a memorial site, with paths leading through the grounds where mass graves were uncovered and a memorial stupa containing thousands of human skulls recovered from the site. It is confronting, but it is also an important place of remembrance.

But after Tuol Sleng, I don’t think either of our hearts could handle it. There is only so much horror you can absorb in one day, and seeing the photographs and the rooms at S-21 had already brought the history brutally close for Raff. I’d been to Choeung Ek before and knew what it would involve, so this time, we don’t go.

Bophana Center 

The Bophana Center offers a very different way into this history. Founded by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, it preserves films, photographs, interviews and other audiovisual records of Cambodia’s history and culture, while also training a new generation of Cambodian filmmakers. It is named after Bophana, a young woman imprisoned and killed at S-21 whose story became the subject of one of Panh’s films.

It’s a reminder that Cambodia’s story isn’t only about what was destroyed. It’s also about the people who survived, remembered and are now telling their own stories.

Ways to support local communities in Phnom Penh

Buying local helps © Aleney de Winter

After spending time confronting Cambodia’s recent history, it’s hard not to think about what has happened since, and the people who have had to rebuild their lives and their communities. Phnom Penh is full of people doing exactly that, through small businesses, social enterprises, arts organisations and other work that creates livelihoods and opportunities.

As travellers, we can’t change Cambodia’s past, but we can choose where some of our money goes now. Sometimes that means supporting a business that deliberately employs people who have fewer opportunities. Sometimes it simply means buying something made here, eating somewhere locally owned or paying someone properly for the work they’re doing. None of it needs to feel worthy. It’s just a way of making sure tourism benefits the people who live here too.

Seeing Hands Massage

After days of clambering over temples and scooter seats, my shoulders are begging for mercy, and Phnom Penh delivers. The city’s Seeing Hands massage centres are staffed by blind and visually impaired masseurs, and they’re one of the best value treats in town. Nika’s Seeing Hands Massage Therapy Center has built a strong reputation with travellers and locals alike, and massages start at around $10 an hour. Plenty of customers reckon blind masseurs are better because of their heightened sense of touch and having had every knot I own located and dealt with, I’m not about to argue. It’s not glamourous but it is one of my favourite wellness experiences in the country.

More importantly, in a country where there is no formal social support system and people with disabilities are too often forgotten, these centres offer skilled, steady work, a regular income and a real measure of independence.

Daughters of Cambodia

Daughters of Cambodia supports women who have been rescued from human trafficking and people from other vulnerable backgrounds, using hospitality and vocational training to help create a path into more secure work.

You can stop in for a meal or coffee at its café, where training is provided in hospitality roles including barista work, cooking and service. It’s a simple way to spend some money while supporting a programme that is helping people build skills, confidence and more independent futures.

Choose Cambodian-made

One of the easiest ways to support local communities is simply to buy things that are actually made in Cambodia. Look for Cambodian textiles, ceramics, jewellery, art and other handicrafts, particularly from independent makers and social enterprises that pay and train local workers.

It might be a silk scarf, a piece of pottery or something completely unnecessary that catches your eye in a market. You’re going to buy a souvenir anyway. It might as well help the person who made it.

Spend with local businesses

The same goes for eating, drinking and getting around. Choosing locally owned restaurants, cafés, tuk-tuks, guides and small businesses keeps more of your holiday spending in the local economy and supports people whose livelihoods depend on tourism.

It’s not about avoiding every international hotel or chain. We stay in them too. It’s just about making room in your holiday for the people and businesses that actually make Phnom Penh what it is.

Where to stay in Phnom Penh

SOMA Hotel Riverside © Aleney de WInter

Phnom Penh has accommodation for every budget, from grand old hotels with serious colonial history to sleek new riverside stays. These are the ones I’d look at, whether you’re after somewhere central for sightseeing or a hotel that feels like part of the experience.

SOMA Hotel Riverside

We stayed at SOMA Hotel Riverside, which had only opened about six months earlier when we arrived, and it still had that lovely new-hotel feeling without any of the awkward teething problems you sometimes get with a place that has barely had time to find its feet. It’s a seriously lovely little hotel, right on the riverside, with contemporary rooms, river views and an infinity pool that makes a pretty compelling argument for abandoning your sightseeing plans for an afternoon.

The location is excellent too, with the Royal Palace, National Museum, Wat Ounalom and the riverside all within easy reach. But what really surprised me was the food. We ate really well here, which isn’t always something I expect from a hotel restaurant.

→ Check current rates at SOMA Hotel Riverside

Raffles Hotel Le Royal

For old-school Phnom Penh glamour, it’s hard to go past Raffles Hotel Le Royal. This grand dame has been welcoming travellers since 1929 and still has the sort of colonial-era atmosphere you actually want in a historic hotel rather than the sanitised version created by a designer with a distressing budget.

Rooms are elegant, there’s a choice of restaurants and bars, and the hotel’s famous Elephant Bar is a destination in its own right. It’s a splurge, but this is one of those hotels where the history is part of what you’re paying for.

→ Check current rates at Raffles Hotel Le Royal

Sofitel Phnom Penh Phokeethra

Sofitel Phnom Penh Phokeethra brings a very different kind of old-world polish, with French colonial styling, landscaped grounds and a location beside the Tonlé Sap River. It’s a particularly good choice if you’d rather come back to somewhere calm after a day battling Phnom Penh traffic.

There’s a large swimming pool, several restaurants and plenty of space to spread out, making it a strong option for families or anyone who likes their city hotel with a bit of breathing room.

→ Check current rates at Sofitel Phnom Penh Phokeethra 

Himawari Hotel Apartments

Himawari Hotel Apartments is a useful option for families or longer stays, with apartment-style accommodation, kitchens and plenty of room to spread out. It’s on the riverfront near the Royal Palace, so you get the convenience of a central location without being packed into a standard hotel room.

There’s also a pool, gym and gardens, making it the sort of place that works particularly well when everyone needs a bit of downtime between bouts of sightseeing.

→ Check current rates at Himawari Hotel Apartments

Know Before You Go: Phnom Penh

Teenager in Phnom Penh © Aleney de Winter

A few practical things are worth knowing before you arrive in Phnom Penh. The city is easy enough to navigate, but Cambodia’s heat, traffic and relatively new airport can make a little planning worthwhile.

Getting to Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh now has a shiny new airport. Techo International Airport, also known as KTI, opened in 2025 and replaced the former Phnom Penh International Airport for commercial operations. It’s considerably farther from the city centre, so allow plenty of time for the transfer, particularly if you’re travelling during busy periods.

There are direct flights from several Asian cities, making Phnom Penh easy to add to a wider Southeast Asia trip. You can also travel overland from Siem Reap and elsewhere in Cambodia by bus, private car or transfer.

Do you need a visa for Cambodia?

Australian passport holders need a visa for Cambodia. The easiest option is the tourist e-Visa, which you can apply for online before you travel.

The tourist e-Visa costs US$30, is single entry and allows a stay of up to 30 days. It is valid for three months from the date of issue and the official processing time is three business days. You’ll need a passport with more than six months’ validity remaining, a digital passport photo and a Visa or Mastercard. I’d still apply at least a week before travelling, because discovering there’s a problem with your visa when you’re trying to get on a plane is nobody’s idea of fun.

Use the official Cambodian government e-Visa site rather than one of the many lookalike websites that will charge you extra for doing exactly the same form.

You’ll also need to complete Cambodia’s free e-Arrival Card within seven days before you arrive. It is separate from the visa and every traveller needs to complete it, even if they already have a visa.

Best time to visit Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh is hot all year round, so there is really no getting around that. The drier months generally run from November to April, while the wet season runs from around May to October. March and April are particularly hot, while the rainy months bring higher humidity and regular downpours.

The wet season has its advantages too. The city is greener, there are generally fewer visitors around and the rain often arrives in spectacular bursts rather than hanging around all day.

Whenever you go, early starts are your friend, particularly for outdoor sightseeing. We’ve learned the hard way that getting out before the heat really kicks in makes a surprisingly big difference to everyone’s enthusiasm.

Getting around Phnom Penh

Getting around Phnom Penh is easy and cheap. Tuk-tuks are everywhere and were our go-to for getting around town, while ride-hailing apps including Grab and PassApp are also widely used and show the fare upfront, which saves you having to negotiate every time you want to go somewhere.

Central Phnom Penh is walkable in places, particularly around the Royal Palace, National Museum and riverside, but Cambodia is hot and distances have a sneaky habit of looking shorter on a map than they feel on foot.

Staying safe in Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh is also a city where I’d use a little common sense with belongings. Keep phones and bags secure around busy markets and traffic, particularly when you’re riding in an open tuk-tuk.

And don’t be afraid to slow down. Some of our best moments here came from simply wandering, eating and watching the city do its thing.

Travelling with InsideAsia

Our time in Phnom Penh tour was organised by InsideAsia Tours as part of oru greater Cambodia adventure, including our food tour, Silk Island Vespa adventure, guides and transport. Having locals sort the logistics meant we could spend less time figuring out where to go and more time eating, exploring and actually enjoying Phnom Penh.

Looking for more Cambodian inspo and info? We’ve got you…

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The post Phnom Penh: What to Eat, See and Do in Cambodia’s Capital appeared first on boyeatsworld.

By the time we turn off the main road and bump down a dusty track on the outskirts of Siem Reap, I’m wondering where on earth we’re going for lunch. Our guide from InsideAsia Tours has promised us a farm-to-table restaurant. Given the surroundings, I’m picturing a rough wooden table, a few chickens wandering underfoot and a stir-fry made from one of their less fortunate cousins.

Siem Reap’s first farm-to-table restaurant is not what I expect

Lum Orng Farm to Table Restaurant appears out of the fields, and I must eat my words before I eat anything else. We’re led through a pretty jungle garden to an elegant traditional wooden house.

Inside, it’s all dark timber beams, woven rattan chairs and gorgeous patterned tiles, with Khmer statues keeping watch from the shelves and a gilded chandelier adding a touch of old-world glamour. It feels elegant without being precious and blissfully cool after the heat outside.

Sheer white curtains frame floor-to-ceiling windows that look straight out into a lush tropical garden, giving the room an almost ethereal air, which is fitting, because once we start eating, we may well have been in actual heaven.

Lum Orng is Cambodia’s first farm-to-table restaurant and is included in the World’s 50 Best Discovery directory. Owner-chef Sothea Seng describes his cooking as New Mekong Cuisine, a style that draws on Cambodian flavours, ingredients and culinary traditions while incorporating influences from across the Mekong region.

The brilliance on the plate has very little to do with chasing fine-dining fashion. Sothea grew up on a farm in Kampong Cham and began cooking for his family as a child, before his career took him into professional kitchens in Cambodia and overseas. Now, at Lum Orng, all that experience is being channelled into something deeply rooted in the food and produce of home.

You can see exactly what that means when the first plates in our tasting menu arrive..

The Lum Orng tasting menu

The jewel-like dishes are ridiculously pretty. Colourful and intricately arranged, they’re artfully finished with herbs, leaves and enough edible petals to give Meghan Markle a small existential crisis.

Our amuse-bouche is what might be the fanciest pork laab I’ve ever encountered, tucked into a delicate crisp tart shell and dressed with herbs and a sprinkling of those petals. It is tiny and absurdly refined, but the flavours are instantly familiar, and one mouthful has me worried I’ll never be able to look an ordinary laab in the eye again.

Then the menu gets serious. A plump scallop arrives layered with crisp green apple, aromatic herbs and a Khmer dressing, the apple bringing a fresh crunch against the sweet, tender scallop and the dressing pulling everything together with a distinctly Cambodian lift. It’s gone in seconds.

Next comes locally sourced chicken with a textural peanut satay glaze, cucumber ribbons, shallots and fresh herbs. It is so good that I spend most of the course defending my plate from Raff, whose fork has developed a worrying habit of drifting across the table.

A wild vegetable and herb soup follows, with baked river fish swimming in a fragrant broth of lemongrass and white ginger. This is the sort of food that makes you properly notice your ingredients. The broth is delicate but deeply aromatic, the herbs earthy and grassy, and the fish beautifully tender.

Then comes a seared fillet of local cobia fish with sweet potato purée and a tamarind and palm sugar glaze. The fish is soft and delicate, the sweet potato earthy and creamy, and the glaze brings the sweet and sour balance that runs through so much Cambodian cooking. It is elegant yet feels completely at home here.

The intermezzo is where Chef Sothea really starts messing with our heads.

Passionfruit sorbet, watermelon, basil and dried fish powder. Yes, dried fish. Raff and I exchange the look of two people who have eaten a lot of strange things together and aren’t sure this is going to be one of the good ones.

It is. The sorbet is sharp and icy, the watermelon sweet and cooling, the basil aromatic, and then the dried fish brings a salty, savoury note that has no business working with sorbet and somehow works brilliantly. There’s a story behind it, too. Sothea grew up eating watermelon topped with dried fish, and this is his elegant, modern take on that childhood snack. What sounds like a dare turns out to be a perfect little hit of sweet, sour, savoury and aromatic, and one of the clearest expressions of what he means by New Mekong Cuisine.

The main is surf and turf, though not as we know it. The perfectly cooked duck breast is served with a seafood wonton and Saraman curry, its rich, aromatic gravy adding depth to the meal.

It’s around here I realise that, for all the flowers, precision and beautiful plating, none of this food is about making Cambodian cuisine look fancy for the sake of it. It just happens to be  fancy.

Then dessert lands. A caramelised cherry tomato tart with coconut ice cream.

I’m sorry, what?

Tomato.

For dessert.

I take a bite and start to rethink everything I thought I knew about tomatoes. Caramelisation has turned the tomato soft, sweet and almost jammy, while the cold coconut ice cream brings a lovely contrast. It might sound like a dare but tastes amazing.

Is Lum Orng worth the price?

For long stretches our table falls completely silent, because we’re far too busy eating to talk. Whenever conversation does return, it’s only for us to gush about whatever we’ve just eaten. The service is equally impressive. Courses arrive at just the right pace, and our server talks us through each one, so we know exactly what’s on the plate.

By now there’s no doubt we’ve stumbled onto somewhere special, and naturally that comes at a price. The Chef’s Tasting Set is US$65 per person, which by Cambodian standards is serious money. Back home, though, it would be a steal, as a meal of this calibre in Sydney would easily cost close to four times as much.

Lum Orng’s Farm-to-Table Philosophy

Lum Orng’s brilliance isn’t coming from some obsession with making Cambodian food look like French fine dining.

It starts much closer to the ground. Organic gardens surround the restaurant and nearby Isann Lodge, Sothea’s boutique stay and cooking school, and there’s a farm and fruit orchard at Beng Mealea, around 65 kilometres from Siem Reap. Depending on the season, they grow everything from jackfruit, mango and palm fruit to wing beans, morning glory, lemongrass and galangal, and whatever can’t be grown is sourced from local farmers, markets and growers across the region.

When Sothea talks about seasonality, it isn’t a buzzword bolted onto the menu. It is the menu. What’s growing decides what we eat, and the kitchen works around the harvest rather than bending the farm to a fixed shopping list. The result is food that feels connected to the landscape outside the window rather than merely inspired by it.

More than just a pretty plate

Even the name tells the story. In Khmer, lum orng means pollen, the tiny grain that fertilises and gives life. For Sothea, it represents growth and regeneration and his own mission to keep Cambodian food traditions alive while pushing them somewhere new.

That mission carries real weight here. Much of Cambodia’s culinary knowledge, from recipes to cooking practices, was lost during the Khmer Rouge years. For chefs like Sothea, preserving Cambodian cuisine doesn’t have to mean freezing every dish exactly as it was. It can mean keeping the ingredients, flavours and ideas alive and giving them room to evolve.

Which explains a lot about our lunch. The dried fish on the sorbet, the palm sugar, the river fish and even the tomato that turned up for dessert are all there for a reason, and every ingredient comes with a memory attached. It’s clever and a little cheeky, and every plate goes back scraped clean, which is about the best review a kitchen can get.

How to book Lum Orng

Our lunch at Lum Orng was organised by InsideAsia, and it’s a perfect example of why travelling with people who genuinely know a destination makes such a difference. They took care of everything, from securing the booking to getting us there and back, and honestly, we’d probably never have found this place on our own. A farm-to-table restaurant hidden down a dirt road outside Siem Reap isn’t the kind of thing you stumble across on a quick search, and it’s exactly the sort of discovery that turns a good trip into a memorable one.

That’s really InsideAsia’s magic. Beyond the logistics, their insider knowledge meant our Cambodia itinerary was full of moments like this, the places and experiences we’d never have known to look for. If you’re planning a trip to Cambodia and want that kind of local culinary expertise woven through your travels, they’re the people to call.

If you’re going it alone, Lum Orng is open daily for lunch from noon to 2pm and dinner from 6pm to 10pm. Bookings are essential, and you can reserve through the restaurant’s website.

Lum Orng Farm-to-Table Restaurant
Thlok Ondong Village
Group 23, Slorkram Commune,
Siem Reap, Cambodia
TEL: +855 10 926 562

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From traditional Khmer healing and temple blessings to meditation, Sak Yant, forest bathing, lotus tea, seriously good massages and luxury spas, discover the many ways to experience wellness in Cambodia.

I keep trying to explain Cambodia to people… and I keep failing, because it’s so much more than the temples or food or even the landscape. It’s the people.

There is something about the way people relate to you in Cambodia. They invite you into their world. They want to share things with you. They talk to you, laugh with you and include you. And it’s not just about doing things for tourists. It’s just the way people are. There is an inherent calm and kindness to it that I just haven’t experienced anywhere else.

They seem somehow lighter. There is a warmth and ease to the way people move through their days, a willingness to stop and talk, laugh with a stranger or share something with you. And after a few days, I realised I was feeling it too. I was lighter. More relaxed, more open, less caught up in whatever noise I had arrived carrying.

The thing is, I didn’t go to Cambodia looking for wellness. Travelling with my teen and the incredible folks at InsideAsia, it wasn’t really on my radar at all. Yet somehow I kept finding it. In temples, in forests, in the hands of healers, over cups of lotus tea and in those quiet moments when nobody was asking anything of me. It was there whether I was looking for it or not.

And the more I noticed it, the more I kept coming back to the same thought. How could a place with such a brutal recent history feel so light?

Cambodia has lived through things I can barely comprehend, and somehow what it has produced isn’t bitterness… it’s warmth. The Khmer Rouge fell in 1979. So this isn’t ancient history. It’s recent enough that the people who lived through it are still here, raising families, running businesses, driving tuk-tuks and guiding tourists. In Siem Reap, our guide is one of them. Kind, warm and genuinely curious about everyone around him. A few days in, he told us a little about his childhood, the civil war, the genocide and the family he lost. He spoke about it plainly, without asking for anything from us in return, then moved on to the next story just as easily.

He is the exact same age as me. He’s lived through the same decades I have, except his childhood and his memories belong to a reality I can barely fathom. And yet here he was looking after us, content and smiling, and taking a genuine interest in everyone around him. How do you live through something like that and still have so much room for other people? I don’t pretend to know the answer, and I don’t want to turn unimaginable trauma into some neat story about resilience. People’s lives are far more complicated than that.

But I kept thinking about that lightness. Maybe there is something here about wellbeing that I hadn’t understood before. Because wellness in Cambodia doesn’t seem to be confined to a spa menu or a yoga retreat. It is tangled up with traditional healing, Buddhism, food, nature, community and the simple act of slowing down.

That got me curious. Not about some grand Cambodian secret to happiness, because that would be ridiculous, and certainly not about turning other people’s experiences into a lesson for the rest of us. I just wanted to understand what I was noticing.

And yes, there are plenty of places where you can lie down while someone with excellent qualifications rubs expensive oil into you. I’m very much on board with those too. But there are plenty of other ways to tap into that feeling of lightness, from traditional healing and meditation to food, nature, movement and simply giving yourself permission to slow down.

Here are some of the best.

Experience Traditional Khmer Healing with a Kru Khmer

If you want to get properly into the Cambodian idea of wellness, start with a Kru Khmer. Kru Khmer are traditional Cambodian healers whose knowledge has been passed down through generations. Their work can encompass herbs and traditional remedies, massage and physical healing, as well as the spiritual and ritual side of wellbeing.

Admittedly, to Western sensibilities, Cambodian wellness can get a little woo, as traditional Khmer medicine doesn’t necessarily make the same distinction between the physical and spiritual worlds that Western medicine does. Herbs, massage, ritual, blessings, beliefs about spirits and ideas about balance can all sit within the same understanding of healing.

But I find it fascinating. This isn’t some modern wellness trend that’s been given a Khmer name and slapped on a spa menu. Traditional Khmer medicine is part of Cambodia’s cultural history and is still practised today.

And while Kru Khmer is uniquely Cambodian, the ideas behind it aren’t. The belief that wellbeing comes from looking after the whole person, using natural remedies, caring for the body and paying attention to what is happening beyond the physical is something you find in healing traditions all over the world. Maybe that’s part of why it still feels relevant.

Around Siem Reap, there are cultural experiences where you can learn about traditional medicine, magic and animist beliefs, and if you want to experience Kru Khmer healing for yourself, Mahalaya Spa at Angkor Grace offers it as part of its treatment menu. The spa describes it as a combination of herbal remedies, therapeutic touch and spiritual practices. Sokunthea Vuthy, who manages the spa, has more than 20 years’ experience in wellness and has trained in Kru Khmer massage. Now, Angkor Grace is a luxury wellness resort, so this isn’t exactly the village-healer experience. But I like that you can book a treatment with someone whose practice and training are documented.

If you’re genuinely unwell, obviously see a doctor. But if you’re interested in Cambodia’s traditional culture, experiencing Kru Khmer healing gives you a glimpse into a completely different understanding of wellbeing.

Try Traditional Cambodian Cupping

Cambodian wellness isn’t all herbal teas and meditation cushions. Traditional bodywork has its own history too, and cupping is part of that.

Cupping uses heated cups placed on the skin to create suction. The result is a collection of perfectly round red or purple marks that can leave your skin looking like it’s taking fashion advice from Minnie Mouse. They can hang around for several days, so perhaps don’t schedule this one immediately before your beach holiday.

It is traditionally used alongside herbal remedies and massage within Cambodian healing, rather than being treated as a standalone spa treatment. The idea is generally to release what is considered excess “air” and restore balance in the body.

I find this side of Cambodian wellness particularly interesting because it feels very different from the increasingly polished version of wellness we’re used to seeing in hotels and spas. These are practices that have existed as part of everyday Cambodian life, passed between generations and used alongside other forms of traditional healing.

If you’re into sporting big-arse polka dots for a few days, go for it. Just make sure you’re seeing a reputable practitioner who knows what they’re doing. In Phnom Penh, Sâmata Medical & Spa offers cupping alongside its other medical and wellness treatments.

Try a Traditional Khmer Herbal Compress

Herbal compress massage is one of those wonderfully old-school Cambodian treatments where someone steams a bundle of herbs and then presses it over your body while they massage you. Traditional herbal medicine has been part of Cambodian healing for generations, and I like that this feels like an actual piece of that tradition rather than something invented to make a spa menu sound exotic.

Depending on the practitioner, you might find those bundles packed with plants, herbs and spices, often including things like lemongrass, ginger and kaffir lime. They smell fantastic and the heat gets right into your muscles. The experience is part massage, part herbal treatment and part wondering why you haven’t done this before.

In Siem Reap, Sra Thnam is a good place to try it, with treatments rooted in traditional Khmer healing and herbal preparations.

Get a Jap Sosay Khmer Massage

If you’ve had Thai massage, traditional Khmer massage will feel familiar, but it has its own style. In Phnom Penh, Cholsa Spa offers traditional Khmer massage uses firm pressure, stretching, acupressure and kneading, and you stay fully clothed rather than being slathered in oil.

It’s a more physical treatment than the floaty resort-spa version of massage, with the therapist working through muscles and joints to ease tension and get everything moving again. After all the herbal compresses, cupping and coining elsewhere in this list, it felt like a pretty good idea to try the Cambodian massage that started the conversation.

Just don’t expect to lie there peacefully contemplating your life. Traditional Khmer massage is hands-on, stretchy and occasionally the sort of experience where you wonder whether your body was flat packed by IKEA and previously assembled without instruction or an Allen key.

Do Yoga at an Angkor Temple

Yoga isn’t exactly a Cambodian invention, but doing it in a Siem Reap jungle temple is a pretty good way to make it feel at home here.  Sacred Sunrise: Private Temple Yoga in Siem Reap takes you to a secluded wooden platform beside one of the Angkor temples, with jungle-clad Preah Khan and Prasat Kravan among the possible locations. The private Hatha session runs from 6am to 8am, with transport, mats and props included and no mirrored walls, traffic or air-conditioning. Just ruins and the sounds of Cambodia waking up around you. Wellness doesn’t get much more rooted in place than that.

Aum Yoga Center takes the idea even further with its Cultural and Wellness Retreat, which includes an early-morning trip into the Angkor jungle to explore temples such as Ta Nei, a silent walking meditation through the forest and a standing yoga sequence in a temple clearing. And after all that downward dog, there’s breakfast.

There’s something about stretching and breathing surrounded by ancient stone, towering trees and birdsong that makes a yoga studio feel a little underwhelming.

Try Traditional Cambodian Coining

One of the more unusual traditional healing practices you’ll come across in Cambodia is coining, or kors kyal. It comes from the traditional belief in “wind illness”, where an imbalance or blockage of wind in the body is thought to cause things like headaches, colds, fevers and muscle aches. The treatment involves rubbing a coin firmly over oiled skin, usually along the back, shoulders or chest, until the skin becomes deeply red. The marks can look pretty dramatic, sometimes leaving bruising that makes it appear as though you’ve been in a fight with a very determined vampire. But coining isn’t some strange relic pulled out for tourists. It is part of traditional Cambodian healing and something many people have grown up with. The practice has its own logic within Khmer medicine, where the body isn’t necessarily understood in quite the same way as it is in Western medicine.

Of course, I tried it and, in fact, liked it enough that I bought one of the little coin device thingies they use and brought it home with me.

Enjoy Sunrise Meditation with a Buddhist Blessing

Get up (very) early and head out through the countryside to Phnom Krom, a 10th-century hilltop temple overlooking the countryside around Siem Reap.

The brilliant folk at InsideAsia arranged a sunrise meditation for my son and me, led by Nina, a meditation teacher who set us up with yoga mats and cushions overlooking the countryside. The meditation itself was very much in the Western mindfulness tradition, all about sitting quietly, focusing on your breathing and trying to persuade your brain to stop racing off in seventeen different directions.

My son succumbed to the incredible relaxation almost immediately. My brain had other plans. But sitting up there as the sun came up, with the countryside spread out below us and the day barely getting started, made it considerably easier to be still for a while.

We then wandered through the sacred temple ruins before heading to a small contemporary pagoda, where a Buddhist monk performed a private blessing ceremony for us, wishing us good health.

It was a world away from the yoga mat. There was chanting and ritual, and suddenly we had moved from Western mindfulness into something much more deeply rooted in Cambodia’s Buddhist tradition.

I loved the combination and walked away feeling genuinely calmer than when I’d arrived, with that slightly tingly feeling you get when you’ve experienced something you couldn’t really have recreated anywhere else.

Maybe that’s part of the secret. You can bring your own ideas about wellness to Cambodia, but there is always something here that makes you slow down and see it a little differently.

Go Forest Bathing at Phnom Kulen

There’s something particularly good about getting your wellness from a forest rather than a treatment room. At Phnom Kulen, we started at Preah Ang Thom, stopping for a blessing at the temple (because apparently you can never have too many blessings), then followed our amazing InsideAsia guide straight into the jungle. And I mean literal jungle. No neatly marked wellness trail or carefully landscaped garden, just narrow tracks through thick forest, getting wilder with every turn. For a while, I felt like the Cambodian Tarzan. I should have been carrying a machete.

The trail eventually led us to a waterfall, where we could cool off in the water and sit surrounded by jungle. After the heat, the swim felt bloody fantastic, but there was something else about the whole thing. The walking, the shade, the sounds of the forest and the complete absence of anything remotely resembling a schedule made it incredibly restorative.

It reminded me of forest bathing (shinrin-yoku), although there was nothing particularly polished or Japanese about it. This was Cambodia doing what Cambodia does best: temples, jungle, water, a local guide and a few hours delving through the bush and connecting with nature. Because sometimes a yomp through the forest followed by a swim is enough.

Get a Blind Massage in Cambodia

In both Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, social enterprises train and employ visually impaired massage therapists, offering skilled massage from people who really know what they’re doing.

This isn’t a token wellness experience where the feel-good part comes at the expense of the massage. The massage is good. Really good. You lie down, hand over your aching shoulders and let someone who knows exactly what they’re doing sort you out.

But the massage is only part of why I think this is such a worthwhile wellness experience. There is something genuinely satisfying about knowing your money is helping create opportunities and independence for someone else. You’re paying for a skill, for someone’s time and for work they are very good at doing. That feels good in itself.

In a country where opportunities for people with disabilities can be limited, businesses that create real employment can make a meaningful difference. And I think there is an emotional side to wellness that we sometimes forget. Feeling better because someone has worked the knots out of your shoulders is one thing. Feeling good about where your money has gone is another.

In Phnom Penh, try Tath Nika Shiatsu and Anma Massage Center, and in Siem Reap, the senses – blind massage or Angkor Seeing Hands Massage By Blind

Find Inner Peace at Cambodia’s Temples and Monasteries

You don’t necessarily need to sit down for a formal meditation session to get that feeling of calm in Cambodia. Sometimes you just need to find a temple and stay there for a while. We spent time at temples around Siem Reap that were nothing like the busy Angkor sites. There were monks moving quietly through the grounds, people coming to pray and enormous old trees throwing shade across the ruins. Nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry.

At Angkor, the scale is enough to stop you in your tracks. At the smaller temples and monasteries, it is the quiet that gets you. These are places where people have been coming to pray, make offerings and contemplate for generations, and you can feel that even when there isn’t another tourist in sight. I found myself slowing down without really deciding to. Looking up at the trees. Listening to the birds and the occasional bell. Sitting for a few minutes simply because there was nowhere else I needed to be.

Maybe these places are sacred for a reason. There is something about spending time somewhere that has been set aside for reflection and prayer for generations that makes it easier to put down whatever you arrived carrying, even if only for a little while. It is surprisingly difficult to feel stressed when you’re sitting beneath an enormous ancient tree with a temple disappearing into it.

Embrace the Woo with Alternative Therapies in Cambodia

For my woo girls, woo boys and anyone else who is perfectly happy to lie down in a darkened room while someone makes beautiful noises with rocks, Cambodia has you covered.

You’ll find crystal singing bowls, sound baths, Reiki, chakra balancing, energy healing, breathwork, meditation and all manner of treatments involving herbs, crystals, oils, incense and things I probably can’t pronounce. You can take it as seriously as you like.

In Siem Reap, Aum Yoga Center runs Yoga Nidra with crystal singing bowls, including a Friday evening session you can drop into without signing up for a retreat.

And if you want to take things further, there’s the Amazing Grace Crystal Sound Temple, a dedicated sound-healing centre where crystal bowls are very much the main event. It is also the venue for the 2026 Global Crystal Bowl Symposium, happening in October 2026, so apparently this is serious business. I have absolutely no idea what a ging does to my energetic frequency. But I can get behind lying down in a darkened room while someone makes beautiful, slightly otherworldly noises for an hour.

Drink Lotus Tea at a Lotus Farm

I am quite literally obsessed with lotus. They are my favourite flowers, so much so that I grow them in pots on my balcony. They are beautiful, obviously, but I also love what they represent in Buddhism. They grow out of mud, rise above the water and produce something beautiful, yet the flowers are fleeting. That combination of strength and impermanence really gets me.

So when I found myself at Lotus Silk Farm in Siem Reap, surrounded by lotus ponds, snacking on lotus seeds and slurping lotus tea, I was pretty much in my happy place. The seeds are packed with protein, fibre, magnesium and potassium, so I was also able to tell myself I was being virtuous while stuffing my face.

The farm makes its tea by putting oolong tea inside a living lotus flower overnight, so it takes on the flower’s flavour. Lotus tea is also traditionally used in Cambodia for medicinal purposes, including digestion, metabolism and sleep. In fact, I’m sucking on it now while I write this.

Other parts of the lotus are used too, with the flowers, leaves, seeds and roots finding their way into food and traditional remedies. Which is part of what I love about the lotus. There seems to be almost nothing this bloody plant can’t do.

Go on a Meditation Retreat in Cambodia with a monk

Everything else in this list nudges your wellbeing in some way, whether that’s through a blessing, a treatment, a swim under a waterfall, good food, time in nature or simply doing bugger all for a while. A Buddhist retreat gives you the time and space to bring all of that together, without the usual noise and without anywhere else to be.

This is obviously a rather different proposition from having a massage between temple visits. You are there to actually stop. To sit. To listen. To observe your own brain doing its ridiculous wandering, with 100 voices all apparently wanting a turn (OK, that may just be mine). And to potentially discover, once you’ve quietened everything else enough to hear it, that it has considerably more enlightening things to say.

In Siem Reap, Hariharalaya runs six- to 16-day yoga and meditation retreats that combine daily practice with a digital detox, workshops, plant-based meals and time to properly switch off. There are also distinctly Cambodian elements, including an Angkor Wat sunrise meditation and a Buddhist monk water blessing. It’s a very different proposition from a formal monastic retreat, but that’s part of the appeal. You can spend a few days actually slowing down without having to disappear from the world completely.

For those wanting to explore the Goenka tradition, Dhamma Kamboja in Kampong Cham runs residential 10-day Vipassana courses based on anapana and vipassana meditation, noble silence and donation-based costs rather than a price tag. And at Blue Indigo, on the banks of the Mekong in Kandal Province, you can opt for something shorter. Its three-day, two-night Buddhist meditation retreat is rooted in the Vipassana Theravada tradition, with daily meditation sessions exploring mindful breathing and sensation awareness. There’s also monk-led guidance, vegetarian meals and the option to take part in a traditional Buddhist blessing ceremony, with Anapana sati and Vipassana meditation forming the heart of the program.

Seaside Spa Days and Wellness Retreats in Kep

Can you have wellness without surrendering your entire holiday to it? Absolutely. The coastal town of Kep is particularly good for this. You can have the spa, the yoga, the meditation and the beautiful surroundings without committing to a week-long retreat where you’re expected to find yourself before breakfast.

Samanea Beach Resort & Spa is a great place to start. Reccomended by our fabulous friends at InsideAsia, it is set in a botanical park on the coast, its Mangrove Spa & Wellness, nestled nonchalantly in an actual mangrove, runs yoga and meditation sessions alongside its treatments, so you can join in when you feel like it and ignore the timetable when you don’t. There is something particularly nice about doing a yoga session surrounded by tropical greenery, then going for a swim or simply lying around doing absolutely nothing.

And Kep itself makes it easy to balance the wellness stuff with, well, an actual holiday. Spend the morning getting a massage or sitting quietly by the water, then wander around town, explore the Crab Market or make the trip up Phnom Bokor into the mountains.

This is probably my preferred level of commitment. A little yoga. A massage. A swim. Some time by the ocean. Then bugger off to the Crab Market for a very large plate of pepper crab.

Enjoy Luxury Spa and Wellness in Cambodia

If money is no object and your idea of wellness involves beautiful architecture, private pools, personalised treatments and someone appearing with a cold towel before you’ve even realised you’re hot, there are plenty of Cambodian retreats ready to add a little extra schmancy to the fancy.

At Metta Residence & Spa in Siem Reap, Visakha Spa has treatments inspired by Khmer traditions, including its 140-minute Visakha Heritage Ritual with a floral foot ritual, Khmer herbal body scrub and traditional Khmer massage. At the time of writing, the spa is closed for restoration, so check its website before planning a visit.

Then there’s Amansara, for people who would like their wellness served with a side of serious luxury and a whole lot of Angkor. Its wellness experiences include monk-led forest walking meditation and a ritual water blessing at a remote Buddhist pagoda.

And if a private villa on a private island sounds more like your idea of wellness, Song Saa Private Island in the Koh Rong Archipelago builds its wellbeing programme around nature, mindfulness and connection, including Saraan Sanctuaries based on the Buddhist concept of metta, or loving kindness.

This is wellness for people who don’t want to know what anything costs. I’m not judging. I’d quite like to be one of those people.

Experience Rainforest Wellness at Shinta Mani Wild

© Shintamani Wild 2017

Shinta Mani Wild is where Cambodia stops mucking about. The ultra-luxury camp sits inside a private reserve in the Cardamom rainforest, with just 15 tents designed by Bill Bensley and strung along a river below a set of waterfalls locals call the Raging Sisters. You arrive by zipline, 400 metres of it, straight over the canopy, which is either the least relaxing start to a wellness stay imaginable or exactly the kind of jolt that makes you actually arrive in your body instead of just checking in.

Wellbeing here isn’t a spa menu bolted onto a luxury stay. It is the rainforest. There are stone foot massages by the river, facials in your tent with nothing but the sound of the water outside, full-body scrubs at the base of a waterfall and yoga in the forest at sunrise. There’s no wifi worth mentioning and nowhere else to be, so the usual noise falls away almost by accident.

And there is another kind of wellbeing running underneath all of it. Bensley reportedly outbid a logging company for the 99-year lease on the land, and every stay at the camp helps fund rangers who patrol the reserve against poaching and illegal logging. So you’re not just disappearing into the rainforest for a few days. Your stay helps protect the place you’re there to enjoy. Honestly, it’s much easier to let go when you know your holiday is helping look after the place you’ve come to see.

Get a Traditional Cambodian Sak Yant Tattoo (but only if you mean it)

This one is not for everyone, but while the sunrise yoga and the blessing were about calming the body and quieting the mind, getting a Sak Yant was about spiritual wellbeing, and I think that’s a part of wellness we sometimes leave out. We talk about looking after our bodies and our mental health, but feeling connected to something bigger than ourselves, having a sense of purpose and doing things that have meaning matter too. For me, this was all of those things wrapped into one very small, slightly owie tattoo.

I’ve been toying with the idea of a Sak Yant tattoo for around 20 years, since my first visit to Cambodia. I’ve returned multiple times, spent days loitering around temples, listened to monks, looked at designs, researched their symbolism and thought about it more times than I can remember. But I’m not really the tattoo type. Until I was.

A Sak Yant is a traditional sacred tattoo associated with spiritual protection, blessings and particular qualities or intentions. The designs have meaning, and the ritual is part of the experience.

So no, this wasn’t a case of seeing a pretty tattoo on Instagram and thinking, yep, I’ll have one of those. I’m Buddhist leaning, and Buddhist ideas around compassion, mindfulness, impermanence and karma are an intentional part of my everyday life. And yes, I’ve read the Dhammapada several times. Thanks for asking.

For me, it was about the meaning, the ritual and the connection to something that already sits comfortably within my own belief system. And it had to be Cambodia, a country I’ve thought of as my spiritual home for more than 20 years and to which I have strong and deeply personal ties.

I also thought carefully about cultural appropriation. I didn’t turn up with a Pinterest board and ask for a pretty design because I liked the way it looked. I was invited into the practice by a proper achar (master), who took the time to understand why I wanted it and what mattered to me, and let him determine the design. Me. Someone who is spectacularly indecisive and a bit of a control freak letting someone else choose what was going permanently on my body. Honestly, who even was I?

But that was kind of the point. Sak Yant is a living Cambodian tradition, not a decorative style, and I wasn’t treating a sacred practice as a collection of pretty symbols to borrow. I was taking the time to understand what I was participating in, why the designs have meaning and what the ritual represents. Whatever you believe about the protective power of a Sak Yant, there is something powerful about approaching a tradition with respect, rather than stripping away the meaning and keeping only the aesthetic.

The whole thing might sound slightly woo if you’re not inclined that way. The prayers, sacred geometry and belief in spiritual protection certainly aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But it resonated with me. After 20 years of thinking about it, I wasn’t there for a souvenir or a fashion statement. My Sak Yant is small and private. It’s something I did for me.

Yes, it hurt. But I’m very glad I did it.

Donate Blood at Angkor Hospital for Children

If there’s one thing on this list that matters more than the rest, it’s this one.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about your wellbeing (and mine). Your body, your mind, your stillness, your spiritual life and your pleasure. But other people’s wellbeing matters too.

Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap asks visitors to donate blood to support children receiving treatment there. There’s no spa treatment at the end of it, no photograph for Insta and no great travel story to tell. You simply roll up your sleeve and give something that another person genuinely needs.

And I think that’s an important part of wellbeing too. Remembering that you’re not the only person in the room whose health, happiness and ability to get through the day matter.

Wellness in Cambodia means more than spas

The more time I spend in Cambodia, the less convinced I am that wellness is something you can neatly package. It might be traditional healing, a monk’s blessing, a few hours sitting quietly in a temple, lotus tea or doing absolutely bugger all beside a pool in Kep. It might be a Sak Yant you’ve yearned for for 20 years or lying on the floor while a crystal bowl rings above your head as you wonder what the hell is happening and absolutely loving it.

But sometimes it is none of those things. Because, at least for me, it is simply Cambodia. The temples, the food, the rivers, the sea and, of course, the people. Perhaps that’s what wellbeing is really about. Coming to a place, connecting with its people and culture, and leaving a little lighter mentally, physically and spiritually than you arrived.

So go. Stay another night. Take the tuk-tuk. Hire the guide. Pay the massage therapist. Buy the lotus tea (and send some to me).

But most of all, just do what works for you. No judgement.

And give a little back while you’re there.

Looking for more real wellness travel inspiration around Asia? Try these…

Japan’s Best Wellness Experiences
Bali’s Best Wellness Experiences
Thailand’s Best Wellness Retreats
Singapore: A view to wellness in Swissotel The Stamford’s Vitality Rooms

 

The post Wellness Experiences in Cambodia appeared first on boyeatsworld.

Photo by Lance Asper on Unsplash

Looking for the best things to do in Fort Lauderdale? From the Riverwalk to wreck diving via, the Everglades and Hollywood (no, not that one), vintage shopping and hidden cultural gems, these are the Fort Lauderdale experiences worth making time for.

Everyone who has ever written about Fort Lauderdale has led with the beach and canals. I know this because I read about four hundred incidental articles while pretending I was doing research but was in fact procrastinating on my own packing. It is alleged that there are more canals here than in Venice. And yes, someone will absolutely tell you that within eleven minutes of your arrival, usually while trying to sell you a jet ski or a kayak or something to put on water.

What nobody tells you about is that Fort Lauderdale has spent the last decade becoming one of the more interesting, layered, culturally rich destinations in Florida, with a growing arts and culture scene, strong Caribbean and Latin American influences, historic neighbourhoods, independent restaurants, museums and wildlife. while still managing to have a reputation stuck somewhere around 1985 spring break.

Yes, Fort Lauderdale will always sell itself on sunshine and yachts, because that is easy and it works. But the version of the city worth writing home about is the one built on culture, community, and a surprising amount of substance under the shine. Here’s where to go if you’re looking for what to do in Fort Lauderdale beyond the beach (and on it).

Las Olas Boulevard

© Aleney de Winter

Las Olas Boulevard turns up in every single article about this city, usually as a passing mention on the way to somewhere else, which is a shame because it deserves an actual visit rather than a glance out a car window. It is genuinely lovely for a slow evening wander, with boutique shopfronts, sidewalk dining, galleries, palm trees and some seriously committed people-watching. The fancy cars cruising up and down are almost entertainment in themselves. You might spot a Lamborghini followed by something that looks like it has driven straight out of 1950s Havana, all gleaming chrome, candy-coloured paint and enormous fins. Go at dusk when the heat has dropped and the street properly comes alive, keep walking until you find somewhere that looks interesting, order something you cannot get at home and resist the urge to rush.

Fort Lauderdale Riverwalk

The New River is where Fort Lauderdale starts to make sense. Walk the Riverwalk through downtown and you get a front-row seat to the strange mix that makes this city work, with million-dollar boats sliding past historic buildings, joggers weaving around tourists, waterfront bars, palms, bridges and the occasional giant yacht making everything else look slightly inadequate.

The paved trail runs for about three miles along the river, linking parks, restaurants, museums, galleries and historic sites. It’s especially good around late afternoon, when the heat starts to ease and the river turns gold. Stop at Stranahan House, Broward County’s oldest surviving building, then keep walking and see how quickly Fort Lauderdale shifts from its pioneer past to its glossy present.

Fort Lauderdale Arts and Culture

© Aleney de Winter

Fort Lauderdale’s creative life is easy to miss if you spend your entire visit between the beach and the pool. Head inland to FATVillage and the MASS District, where galleries, studios, bars and event spaces occupy former industrial spaces and colourful murals turn walls and laneways into open-air galleries. The best time to explore FATVillage is during an art walk or other local event, when galleries stay open late, artists come out and the streets fill with people. In 2026, Broward County is celebrating 50 years of arts and culture, with exhibitions, performances and community events happening across Greater Fort Lauderdale, giving you another reason to get off the beach and see what the city is making.

Fort Lauderdale Museums and Galleries

Fort Lauderdale’s better-known museums include the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, with its permanent collection of more than 7,500 works spanning American, Latin American and contemporary art, including a major collection of work by William Glackens, and the Museum of Discovery and Science, where interactive exhibits cover everything from space and engineering to the human body, Florida’s ecosystems and the science of the natural world. Both are downtown, so they’re easy to fold into a first visit. But Fort Lauderdale has plenty of smaller museums that are easy to miss and, frankly, much more fun for it.

Fort Lauderdale takes swimming very seriously. The International Swimming Hall of Fame sits right on the beachfront and celebrates the people, places and slightly ridiculous achievements that have shaped the sport, from Olympic medals and swimming memorabilia to underwater photography and even props from the old Tarzan movies. It is a wonderfully Fort Lauderdale combination of serious sporting history and things you probably did not expect to find in a swimming museum.

The Fort Lauderdale Antique Car Museum is tucked behind the airport and easy to drive straight past, which would be a mistake. Inside is a genuinely excellent collection of restored Packards spanning the early 1900s to the 1940s, some with built-in golf-club compartments because apparently that was once a thing rich people needed. It’s open Monday to Friday from 10am to 4pm and Saturday from 10am to 3pm, which feels about right for a museum this charmingly under the radar

The Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library holds one of the world’s largest LGBTQ+ collections and archives. Exhibitions rotate and programming is active, so check what’s on before you go.

The Old Davie School Historical Museum, a short drive inland, occupies the actual 1918 schoolhouse and tells the story of South Florida’s agricultural past through artefacts, photographs and maps.

And History Fort Lauderdale, on the New River downtown, brings together historic buildings including the 1905 New River Inn and King-Cromartie House to tell the city’s early story without requiring an entire day and a pair of sensible shoes.

Historic Fort Lauderdale and Sistrunk

© Aleney de WInter

Fort Lauderdale’s story is much bigger than the beach and the yachts. For a proper dose of local history and culture, head into the Sistrunk corridor and look beyond the glossy waterfront. The Old Dillard Museum and the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center are part of a part of the city that deserves considerably more attention than it gets.

I’d also make time for Island SPACE Caribbean Museum in nearby Plantation. The museum tells the story of Caribbean people, culture and history in the United States, from pre-colonisation through slavery and emancipation and into the modern era.

This is the stuff that changes the way you see a destination. You stop looking at Fort Lauderdale as a collection of beaches and hotels and start understanding the communities that actually made the place.

Bonnet House Museum & Gardens

Bonnet House Museum & Gardens is one of those places that makes you wonder why anyone ever decided modern houses needed to be sensible. The 35-acre estate sits between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal and combines a historic house, art, gardens and several distinct ecosystems. There are orchids, tropical gardens, nature trails, peacocks and enough eccentric personal touches to make you want to go home and repaint something.

A quick word about the architecture, because the usual description needs a bit of context. Bonnet House is sometimes described as “Caribbean plantation-style”, but that refers to its architectural influence, not its history. Frederic Clay Bartlett began building the house in 1920 as a winter home with his wife, Helen Birch, on land her father, Hugh Taylor Birch, had acquired decades earlier. The property was never a working plantation and was never home to enslaved people.

The site does have older history, however, with archaeological evidence of Tequesta occupation dating back thousands of years. The house itself is wonderfully odd and personal, preserving the Bartletts’ home, art and gardens and offering a glimpse of early 20th-century South Florida before the surrounding coastline was heavily developed. It feels like a real home belonging to real people rather than a historic building where every chair has been roped off and nobody is allowed to breathe near it.

Everglades Airboat Tours

Photo by Richard Sagredo on Unsplash

Yes, the Everglades is an obvious thing to do near Fort Lauderdale. It is obvious because it is spectacular.

Head west of the city and take an airboat into the wetlands, where the scenery changes from palm trees and high-rises to sawgrass, mangroves and an awful lot of water. Keep your eyes peeled for alligators lurking in the shallows, because even the wildlife here has perfected the art of looking completely unbothered. Just don’t mistake their nonchalance for friendliness. These are not cuddly Florida mascots. They will eat you.

The airboat ride itself is half the fun. The flat-bottomed, propeller-powered boats skim across the shallow wetlands and marshes, getting you into parts of the Everglades you simply can’t reach by car. Some tours describe the experience as being a bit like riding a hovercraft, which feels about right when you’re gliding across the water with a giant fan roaring behind you.

Choose an operator that knows the ecosystem rather than one whose entire business model appears to be doing doughnuts in the sawgrass for Instagram. The Everglades is not just an entertaining backdrop. It is one of the world’s most important wetland ecosystems, and getting out into it gives you a much better sense of why it matters.

Hugh Taylor Birch State Park

Right in the middle of all the condos, traffic and shiny waterfront development is 180 acres of something that feels considerably older. Hugh Taylor Birch State Park sits between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal, protecting one of the last remaining stretches of tropical maritime hammock in this part of Broward County. There are shaded trails, a freshwater lagoon, mangroves, wildlife and places to kayak or paddle, so you can swap Fort Lauderdale’s glass and concrete for something considerably greener without actually leaving the city. Hugh Taylor Birch donated the land for public use, and that decision is a big part of why this little pocket of Old Florida survived.

Flamingo Gardens

© Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau

Flamingo Gardens is technically a botanical garden and wildlife sanctuary, and I am including it here because “technically” undersells it enormously. One of South Florida’s oldest, founded in 1927 and spread across 60 acres in Davie, just west of Fort Lauderdale at 3750 South Flamingo Road, it is open daily from 9.30am to 5pm. Between the towering champion trees, the free-flight aviary, a narrated tram tour, and resident wildlife including rescued panthers, bears, alligators and, yes, actual flamingos, it is a slower, greener counterpoint to everything shiny and fast happening back on the coast. Go early, take your time, and accept that you will end up taking an unreasonable number of photos of a bird that is, let us be honest, mostly just standing there.

Kayaking in Fort Lauderdale

Photo by Paddle North on Unsplash

For a different view of Fort Lauderdale, swap the yacht for a kayak and head into the mangroves. Hugh Taylor Birch State Park has easy paddling on its freshwater lagoon, while nearby Anne Kolb Nature Center in Hollywood opens into a much larger mangrove wetland threaded with kayak trails. It is a good way to see the quieter side of South Florida, with mangrove tunnels, waterways and wildlife replacing the towers and traffic. You don’t need to be an experienced paddler either. This is more about poking around the waterways than proving anything to anyone.

Secret Woods Nature Center

You would never guess there was a place like this in the middle of Fort Lauderdale. Secret Woods Nature Center is a 57-acre pocket of native South Florida forest and wetland tucked between roads and development, with shaded trails, boardwalks and two small rivers to explore.

Walk the trails and you’ll find a very different side of the city, with mangroves, cypress, palms and the sort of wildlife you don’t generally associate with a built-up Florida city. There are turtles, wading birds, butterflies and, if you’re lucky, the occasional alligator doing what alligators do best, which is sitting extremely still and making you question whether that log was there a minute ago.

There are short trails and boardwalks rather than a serious hike, making it an easy stop when you want some nature without committing half a day to it. And honestly, the name alone makes it worth finding. Fort Lauderdale has plenty of places that want you to know they’re there. Secret Woods is much more fun because it feels like you weren’t supposed to know about it.

Wreck Diving in Fort Lauderdale

© Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau

Fort Lauderdale is known as the “Wreck Diving Capital of the World”, with a remarkable collection of artificial reefs and deliberately sunk vessels just offshore. The wrecks sit close enough to the coast to make diving here unusually accessible, with sites ranging from shallow reefs suitable for snorkelling and newer divers to deeper wrecks for experienced scuba divers.

You don’t need to be a hardcore diver to get a taste of what’s beneath the surface either. Snorkelling trips and introductory dives offer a way to see the city’s underwater side without committing to a full wreck-diving expedition. It is one of the best reminders that Fort Lauderdale’s relationship with the water doesn’t stop at the shoreline.

Things to Do in Hollywood, Florida

Photo by Esteban Carriazo on Pexels

A short drive south, Hollywood (the Florida one, considerably fewer film stars, considerably more charm) is doing its own quiet cultural thing away from the Fort Lauderdale spotlight. Downtown Hollywood, centred on Harrison Street and Hollywood Boulevard, is made for proper wandering, with independent shops, cafes, restaurants and galleries giving you plenty of reasons to keep poking around rather than simply passing through. Street art turns up on walls and laneways, giving the area a scrappy creative energy that the marinas up the road don’t really go in for. The Downtown Hollywood Mural Project is particularly worth seeking out if you like your sightseeing with a bit of colour and less historical plaque. Then head towards Hollywood Beach and its famous Broadwalk, where the mood shifts from artsy downtown to old-school seaside holiday.

If you want to see the spectacularly over-the-top side of South Florida, head inland to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, instantly recognisable for its enormous guitar-shaped hotel. The complex has restaurants, bars, live entertainment and the casino itself, but even if gambling isn’t your thing, the sheer scale of the place makes it worth seeing. It is about as far from the old-school beach-town feel of Hollywood Beach as you can get, which is precisely why it is interesting.

Where to Eat in Fort Lauderdale

© Aleney de Winter

Fort Lauderdale’s food scene is considerably more interesting than the waterfront restaurant strips might suggest. Yes, there is excellent seafood, and yes, there are plenty of places where you can eat an expensive dinner while watching a yacht the size of a small apartment glide past. But the city’s Caribbean, Cuban, Latin American and Southern influences are where things get interesting, particularly once you leave the beach and follow where locals actually eat.

For a cheap and genuinely local meal, seek out the city’s Caribbean food. Michelle Flavor’s Caribbean Restaurant does Jamaican comfort food including oxtail, jerk chicken, curry goat and escovitch snapper, while Reflexion Restaurant is a good introduction to Haitian cooking, with griot, diri djon djon and plantains. Cuban cafes and neighbourhood restaurants are another part of the picture, with pressed Cubanos, roast pork, rice and beans, pastelitos and strong cafecitos.

Then there are the seafood places that actually make sense in a city built around water. Coconuts is a Fort Lauderdale favourite for casual waterfront seafood, while the more polished end of the spectrum includes places such as Takato, where Japanese and Korean influences meet a serious beach view.

The city also has a habit of tucking good restaurants into buildings with previous lives. The House on the River is a brilliant example, occupying a genuinely old riverside building with the kind of character you cannot fake with clever lighting and a Pinterest board. If you want a meal that feels connected to the city rather than another restaurant chosen because it has a river view, this is your stop.

And then there are the places that make eating in Fort Lauderdale feel like an experience rather than simply another meal.

At Regina’s Farm, you can eat a Brazilian dinner in an urban farm setting, with meals inspired by the cooking of Minas Gerais. It is the kind of experience that feels much more connected to the people who live here than another restaurant picked because it has a good view. The dinners are popular, so book well ahead if you want to get a seat.

For something considerably more theatrical, head to The Wreck Bar at B Ocean Resort, where porthole windows look straight into the swimming pool and mermaid performances take place underwater. The mermaids have been part of the bar’s slightly bonkers history since the 1950s, making this one of those wonderfully kitsch Florida experiences that is impossible to take too seriously. Order a drink, settle in and watch the underwater show through the glass.

And if you like your cocktails with a side of secrecy, Rm. 901 is a reservations-only speakeasy opposite the NSU Art Museum, styled around Prohibition-era Fort Lauderdale. It is a little more polished than the average hidden bar, but the old-school atmosphere makes it a fun change from the city’s waterfront drinking scene.

Vintage Shopping in Fort Lauderdale

If, like me, your idea of a good holiday souvenir involves something with a previous life, Fort Lauderdale has plenty to rummage through. Wilton Manors is good territory for designer consignment, and a few names come up again and again for having the genuinely good stuff rather than picked-over leftovers. Worth Repeating Fine Consignments is the closest thing the area has to a proper resale institution, nearly four decades in, housed in a distinctive green-shuttered building, with racks of gently worn Chanel, YSL, Gucci, and Burberry that well-heeled Fort Lauderdale women quietly cycle through rather than be seen in twice. A few doors down, Snooty Fox Consignments is another serious go-to for designer pieces at a step down in price and formality. And just north in Oakland Park, Oddballs Nifty Thrift is the one locals actually call their favorite, the kind of place regulars describe as feeling more like a museum than a thrift shop.

The Old Florida Book Shop in Dania Beach is particularly good for bookish treasure, with rare books, antique maps and vintage magazines crammed into a gloriously old-school shop. If it’s vinyl you’re after,

We Got the Beats in Oakland Park is the one that turns up on every local’s list, with new and used records, CDs, tapes, and turntables and a staff that will happily talk you through a pressing before you buy it. For something scrappier, Vinylocoz is tucked inside Lola’s Bazaar Market in Wilton Manors, a dig-through-the-crates kind of shop heavy on rock, hip hop, reggae, and Latin American psych. The wider area also turns up more vintage furniture, fashion and the sort of wonderfully unnecessary objects you absolutely did not know you needed until you saw them.

And while it’s not vintage, if you’re after a bargain, head to Sawgrass Mills, one of the largest outlet shopping destinations in the United States. It draws shoppers from well beyond Fort Lauderdale with hundreds of stores under one very large roof, so you can swap vintage finds for designer labels at outlet prices. It is not exactly the local, independent experience above, but if you want designer labels at outlet prices, this is where you go.

Getting Around Fort Lauderdale

Image Mariya Eskina on Pexels.

A car is useful in Fort Lauderdale, particularly if you’re planning to venture beyond the central areas, although parking and traffic can turn a short trip into a surprisingly slow one. Downtown, Las Olas and the beach are easier to explore on foot, while rideshares are handy when the distances get awkward. And then there are the waterways, which offer a far more enjoyable way to get around.

The Water Taxi is part sightseeing cruise, part hop-on, hop-off transport, connecting stops around the Intracoastal and New River, with services extending to Hollywood and other destinations. You can hop off around restaurants, shopping areas, beaches and waterfront attractions, then climb back aboard when you’re ready to keep exploring.

This might be the best way to see Fort Lauderdale’s waterways, too. You get all the mansion-and-mega-yacht gawking without being responsible for steering anything.

If you’d rather make the water the actual event, book a sightseeing or dinner cruise on the New River or Intracoastal. These cruises turn the city’s waterways into the main attraction, with views of waterfront mansions, marinas, downtown and the mega-yachts that make Fort Lauderdale look faintly ridiculous in the best possible way. A sunset or evening cruise is particularly good when the heat drops and the city starts lighting up.

Fort Lauderdale Yachts and Marinas

© Aleney de Winter

I have just spent several thousand words making the case that Fort Lauderdale is more than its yachts, and I stand by every word of it, but I would also be lying if I pretended the yachts are not a genuine spectacle worth seeing, in the same way you’d go and look at an enormous old cathedral in a European city, even if you are not religious.

Bahia Mar Yachting Center, across from Fort Lauderdale Beach, is the city’s most iconic marina address and the permanent home of the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show each November, the largest boat show on the planet and, for one week a year, basically the entire personality of the city. Pier Sixty-Six, over on the Intracoastal, takes vessels up to 400 feet and somehow makes that sound like a modest claim once you have seen what actually pulls in.

You do not need a boat, an invitation, or a trust fund to enjoy any of this, walking the docks and doing frankly unreasonable amounts of yacht based small talk with strangers costs nothing. Just do not let it be the only Fort Lauderdale story you come home with.

Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show

If you happen to be in Fort Lauderdale in late October, you may as well lean into the yacht thing properly and go to the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. Held across the city’s waterfront, FLIBS is the world’s largest in-water boat show, and for five days the city’s already considerable obsession with boats goes completely off the scale. The 2026 show runs from October 28 to November 1.

You don’t need to be in the market for a $20 million superyacht to enjoy it. There are boats of every imaginable size, from sleek little runabouts to floating mansions that appear to require their own postcode, along with marine technology, fishing gear, watersports equipment, food, drinks and plenty of people who know considerably more about boats than you probably ever intended to.

The show stretches across multiple waterfront venues, with free transportation connecting the sites, so it is less a traditional exhibition and more a very large, very shiny takeover of Fort Lauderdale’s waterways. You can wander the docks, climb aboard boats, gawp at the superyachts and generally indulge in some spectacularly shameless people-watching.

If you’re visiting Fort Lauderdale specifically for the boat show, book accommodation early and allow more time than you think you’ll need. This is not the sort of event you race through in an hour. And if you have absolutely no interest in boats, well, honestly, you might still have fun. It is very hard to stand beside a yacht the size of a small apartment and remain completely unimpressed.

Fort Lauderdale Beaches

Photo by Lance Asper on Unsplash

It would be disingenuous to write about Fort Lauderdale and pretend the beaches are not part of why people fall for this place. Skip trying to hit all of them and just pick your flavour. Fort Lauderdale Beach itself is the wide, palm lined, postcard version, good for a proper swim and a walk along the promenade without needing to drive anywhere else. Hollywood Beach has a broader, more local, less polished energy with its own boardwalk running alongside it. Either one will do exactly what a Florida beach is supposed to do, so choose based on whether you want polish or personality and do not overthink it further than that.

Where to stay in Fort Lauderdale

Fort Lauderdale has plenty of places to stay, from big beachfront resorts to smaller properties with a bit more character. These four offer very different ways to experience the city.

Waterfront | Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina

I stayed at Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina, which sits on the Intracoastal Waterway just a short walk from the Broward County Convention Center. There’s a marina, waterfront dining, a pool and a Water Taxi stop at the hotel, plus a shuttle to Fort Lauderdale Beach. It’s a particularly handy base if you’re mixing business with a few days of exploring.

→ Check current rates for Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina

Beachfront | Sun Tower Hotel & Suites

For something smaller and more relaxed, Sun Tower Hotel & Suites sits right on Fort Lauderdale Beach. The family-friendly hotel has just 23 rooms, with some suites offering kitchenettes and separate living areas, while the oceanfront balconies make a pretty convincing case for morning coffee with a view. There’s a garden pool too, although with the beach right outside, good luck getting the kids to use it.

→ Check current rates for Sun Tower Hotel & Suites

Family resort | Lago Mar Beach Resort & Club

Lago Mar Beach Resort & Club is the sort of place where the kids can disappear for half a day and you won’t hear a peep. The 10-acre beachfront resort has its own 500-foot private beach, two pools, mini-golf, tennis, pickleball, beach volleyball, a playground and giant chess. Family suites have separate living areas, kitchenettes and balconies, while the whole place has an old-school Florida holiday feel that makes the resort itself part of the experience.

→ Check current rates for Lago Mar Beach Resort & Club

Boutique & romantic | The Club at Birch House

For couples after somewhere a little more intimate, The Club at Birch House is a small coastal residence with just five suites, a garden, terrace and year-round outdoor pool. Fort Lauderdale Beach is a two-minute walk away, while the suites are designed to feel more like a private home than a conventional hotel. It’s a lovely option for a slower few days, with the beach, marina and restaurants all close by.

→ Check current rates for The Club at Birch House

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The post Things to Do in Fort Lauderdale beyond the beach appeared first on boyeatsworld.

From fish amok and Kampot pepper crab to fried tarantulas, here’s your guide to Cambodian food and the must-try Khmer dishes.

The temples of Angkor might be Cambodia’s most popular drawcard, but for this very hungry family, Cambodian food comes a very close second.

Cambodian cuisine, also known as Khmer cuisine, has in recent decades lived in the shadow of its two culinary heavyweight neighbours, Thailand and Vietnam. Yet the Khmer Empire, which at its height stretched across much of present-day Thailand and southern Vietnam, left its mark on the cooking of both. That said, if you’re expecting a carbon copy of Thai or Vietnamese cuisine on your Cambodian plate, you might be surprised. You will find the regional love of carefully balanced sweet, sour, salty and bitter flavours, but Khmer food tends to be less fiery than Thai, leaning instead on kroeung (an aromatic paste of lemongrass, galangal, turmeric and kaffir lime), fermented fish paste known as prahok, fresh herbs and the country’s prized Kampot pepper.

Centuries of outside influence, from Chinese and Indian traders to French colonists (hello, baguettes), have seen Cambodian cuisine develop into something truly its own. Yet the country’s culinary traditions were very nearly lost. During the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, cookbooks were deemed too bourgeois and, along with almost 80 per cent of all written works in Khmer, were destroyed under Pol Pot’s genocidal rule. Today, following years of diligent work by Cambodian chefs to record and revive the recipes of the country’s pre-Khmer Rouge heritage, Cambodia’s national cuisine is enjoying something of a renaissance, and we’ve been more than happy to do our bit by eating as much of it as humanly possible.

Here are our tips for eating your way around Cambodia like a local.

Cambodian food: the dishes you need to try

Protein heavy and frequently flavoured with pungent prahok, a crushed, salted and fermented fish paste that’s seen as an essential ingredient in Cambodian kitchens, most Cambodian cuisine is served with a side of rice or noodles. Due to its location, freshwater fish also plays a big part in the country’s cuisine.

The national dish is amok trey, a sublime coconut fish curry that is steamed to soufflé-like perfection in banana leaves or served in a coconut. Prahok ktis, a pungent dip of fermented fish, minced pork, pea eggplants and coconut, is another popular dish, while there’s plenty of grilled meat, noodles, salads and all manner of things you’ll find sizzling away at markets and roadside stalls.

There’s a lot to get through, so loosen your belt and start here. These are some of the Cambodian dishes we reckon you should look out for.

Fish amok (coconut fish curry)

The undisputed star of Khmer cuisine. Fish is bathed in coconut milk and kroeung, a fragrant paste of lemongrass, galangal, turmeric and kaffir lime, then steamed in banana leaf cups until it sets into a silky, custardy curry. Every restaurant has its own version, and we have made it our solemn duty to try as many as possible.

Banh chao (crispy Cambodian pancakes)

Cambodia’s crispy, turmeric-yellow pancakes are made from rice flour and coconut milk, then stuffed with pork, prawns and bean sprouts and folded like an omelette. If they look familiar, that’s because they’re a close cousin of Vietnam’s banh xeo, and just as moreish (here’s our recipe for banh xeo if you’d like to try making them at home). Tear off a piece, wrap it in lettuce and fresh herbs and dunk it in sweet and tangy fish sauce. They’re messy to eat, wonderfully crunchy and completely addictive.

Nhoam kroch thlong (pomelo salad)

Cambodia’s pomelo salad is made with juicy pomelo segments, prawns or shredded chicken, fresh herbs, toasted coconut and crushed peanuts, all tossed through a dressing of lime, fish sauce and a little chilli. The combination of sweet pomelo and salty, sour dressing makes this a particularly good choice when the weather is doing its usual Cambodian sauna impression.

Prahok ktis (fermented fish and pork dip)

This is one for the adventurous eater. Fermented fish paste is cooked with minced pork, coconut milk and pea eggplants, then served with a pile of fresh vegetables for dipping. The prahok gives it a powerful savoury flavour, so if you’ve been wondering what all the fuss is about with Cambodia’s famously funky fermented fish paste, this is a good place to start.

Laab (minced meat or fish salad)

Minced fish, beef or chicken is tossed with lime juice, fish sauce, lemongrass, shallots, fresh herbs and toasted ground rice, which gives the whole thing a lovely little crunch. Cambodia’s version of this Lao and Thai favourite generally goes easier on the chilli, and fish laab is particularly good. We liked it enough to create our own Cambodian-inspired lemongrass and lime fish larb to make at home.

Samlor korko (vegetable and fish soup)

Often called Cambodia’s national soup, samlor korko is a hearty bowl filled with vegetables, green papaya, pumpkin and toasted ground rice, all flavoured with kroeung. Fish or pork usually provides the protein. It’s the sort of food that feels much more like home cooking than something designed for a tourist menu, so if you spot it, order it.

Nom banh chok (Khmer rice noodles)

Known as Khmer noodles, this is one of Cambodia’s favourite breakfasts. Fresh rice noodles are topped with a green fish curry and a generous pile of raw herbs, banana flower, cucumber and beans. It is a surprisingly fresh way to start the day, particularly after a night spent sampling the local beer.

Kuy teav (rice noodle soup)

Another breakfast staple, kuy teav starts with a clear pork broth and can be topped with minced pork, meatballs, offal or seafood. The bowl comes with the usual collection of accompaniments, so you can add lime, chilli, garlic oil and bean sprouts until you’ve got breakfast exactly how you like it.

Bai sach chrouk (grilled pork and rice)

Thin slices of pork are marinated in garlic, coconut milk and palm sugar before being grilled slowly over charcoal and served with broken rice, pickles and a bowl of clear broth. It’s a Cambodian breakfast staple and one of those dishes that makes you wonder why you bothered with toast for so many years.

Lok lak (peppery beef stir-fry)

A crowd-pleaser, particularly if you’re travelling with people who aren’t quite ready to tackle fermented fish or deep-fried spiders. Cubes of stir-fried beef are served with lettuce, tomato and onion, often alongside rice and a fried egg. The dipping sauce, made with Kampot pepper, salt and lime juice, is what really brings it all together.

Trey chien chuon (crispy fried fish)

A whole fish is deep fried until the skin goes beautifully crisp, then covered with a sweet, sour and gingery sauce. It’s usually brought to the table whole, so there’s a little bit of theatre involved before everyone starts pulling it apart.

Lort cha (stir-fried rice noodles)

Short, hand-rolled rice noodles are thrown into a smoking-hot wok with bean sprouts, chives, beef and a sweet and savoury sauce, then topped with a fried egg. Watching the noodles being tossed around in the wok is half the fun, although eating them is considerably more satisfying.

Num pang (Cambodian baguette)

Speaking of baguettes, num pang is Cambodia’s answer to the banh mi, filled with pâté, grilled meats or sardines, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs. You’ll find them everywhere from markets to roadside stalls, making them particularly useful when you need something quick between temple stops.

Nom krok (coconut rice cakes)

These little coconut rice cakes are cooked in a dimpled pan, giving them crisp edges and a soft centre. They are usually sold by the handful at markets, which is probably just as well because stopping at one is virtually impossible.

Kralan (sticky rice roasted in bamboo)

Sticky rice, coconut and black beans are packed into bamboo tubes and roasted over hot coals. Once the bamboo is peeled away, the rice comes out in a dense, chewy block with a lovely smoky flavour. It looks pretty unremarkable, but somehow that makes it even better when you take a bite.

Sankhya lapov (pumpkin custard)

A whole pumpkin is hollowed out, filled with coconut and palm sugar custard and steamed until the custard sets. It is then sliced into wedges so you get a layer of pumpkin with every spoonful of creamy filling. It looks spectacular on a plate, although the basic idea is wonderfully simple.

Market munchies: the best food markets in Cambodia

Many of the restaurants and cafes in Cambodia‘s more popular tourist areas serve up dishes that have been tweaked for Western palates, so if you’re after a genuine taste of Khmer cuisine, we reckon the markets should be your first port of call. They’re noisy, crowded, occasionally whiffy and absolutely where the good stuff is.

In Phnom Penh, the Russian Market, or Phsar Toul Tom Poung, earned its nickname from the Russian expats who shopped there in the 1980s.

These days it’s a sprawling, sweaty maze of stalls selling everything from silk scarves and knock-off designer gear to motorbike parts, but head for the food section at its heart and you’ll find locals perched on stools slurping noodles and tucking into rice plates at all hours.

We explored it with our InsideAsia guide, which made all the difference. She steered us past the tourist trinkets and straight to the stalls worth queuing for, explained what was bubbling away in every pot and saved us from a fair bit of pointing and hoping for the best. A highlight was a steaming plate of lort cha, short hand-rolled rice noodles tossed on a smoking wok with bean sprouts, chives and bits of beef, crowned with a fried egg and a slosh of sweet chilli sauce. It was one of our favourite meals of the whole trip.

In Siem Reap, Phsar Leu is our favourite. It’s the town’s biggest local market, a little out of the centre and blissfully free of tour groups, with an excellent food hall where we’ve eaten some of our best meals in Cambodia for a couple of dollars. The Old Market, or Phsar Chas, near Pub Street, is more geared towards visitors but still has plenty of local food stalls tucked in among the souvenirs.

And in Kep, the crab market is as much a spectacle as a place to shop. Women wade into the shallows to pull up bamboo crab pots, while vendors sell squid, prawns and fish grilled over coals, with Kampot pepper by the bag to take home.

Among the other market meals Raff and I loved was nom banh chok, thin rice noodles served with fish gravy and freshly foraged greens. Nom kachai, fried glutinous rice cakes dotted with chives and served with a vinegar and sweet pepper sauce, is always a good idea, unless you’re counting calories. And should you be craving something sweet, chet chien, bananas deep fried in spring roll wrappers, or a couple of crispy-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside noum kong, the Khmer take on a doughnut, should do the trick.

If you, like us, are inclined to walk on the culinary wild side, you can also try jerky-style frog, barbecued snake on a stick and deep-fried crickets, which are sold on the streets like bags of popcorn.

Cambodian barbecue: from Siem Reap’s 60 Road to sizzling seafood in Kep

Like Aussies, Cambodians love a barbie, and while it’s not unheard of to find shrimp (or humongous prawns), they do tend to do things a little differently to us. Forget the snags and lamb chops, instead expect to find a bunch of (often indistinguishable) stuff on sticks

We love to join the hordes of local families gathered on roadside mats to dine on a variety of Cambodian barbecue delights at Siem Reap‘s 60 Road. Sizzle central, the street is lined with vendors serving up skewered whole fish and chicken, little red balls of sweet Cambodian pork sausage and a smorgasbord of random offal and organs javelined on bamboo sticks. Then there’s the stuffed skewered frogs and coiled snake shish kebabs, and the odd penis from what I imagine is a cow with a fairly high-pitched moo.

What fascinates us about 60 Road is that this roughly one-kilometre stretch essentially materialises each evening, turning what is otherwise a fairly ordinary road into a sprawling culinary oasis. Then, almost as quickly as it appears, the whole thing disappears again the following morning.

The market has undergone a huge expansion since we last visited, and there’s more than just barebcue on offer, so having our InsideAsia guide on hand to help us navigate the stalls and choose what to eat was brilliant. He knew exactly what was what and pointed us towards things we might otherwise have walked straight past.

But you don’t need to be in Siem Reap to get your barbecue fix. Wherever you are in Cambodia, follow your nose around dusk and you’ll almost certainly find a street vendor fanning a charcoal brazier by the roadside. The star of the show is usually sach ko ang, beef marinated in a fragrant paste of lemongrass, garlic, palm sugar and fish sauce, then grilled until caramelised at the edges. Chicken, pork ribs and whole fish get similar treatment, and much of it is served with a little dish of tuk meric, a zingy dipping sauce of Kampot pepper, salt and lime juice that you’ll want to put on absolutely everything.

In the capital, it is also worth seeking out a Cambodian tabletop barbeque, known locally as phnom pleung, or “fire mountain”. Groups gather around a domed grill set over hot coals, sizzling thin slices of marinated beef, seafood and vegetables on the top while broth simmers in the moat around the edge. Add a few cold Angkor beers and plenty of noise, and it’s about as local and social as a Cambodian dinner can be.

Head south to the coast, and the barbecue turns briny. In Kep and Kampot, stalls grill squid, prawns and fish over coals just metres from where the boats come in. But that deserves it own section.

Save room for the sweet end of the grill, too. Street vendors char ripe bananas, sometimes flattened and basted with coconut milk and sugar, and grilled corn cobs are a popular snack all over the country. Even eggs get the barbecue treatment, skewered and roasted in their shells until smoky.

Cambodian seafood

Cambodia’s southern coast is where seafood really takes centre stage. In Sihanoukville, Kampot and Kep, fish, squid, lobster, prawns, crab and shellfish are pulled fresh from the Gulf of Thailand and sold from shacks along the water, and much of it lands on the grill before you’ve even found a seat.

We absolutely loved Kep. This sleepy seaside town is famous for its crab market, where local fishermen bring in their catch and vendors sell it straight from the baskets, fresh and cooked, while ramshackle restaurants along the shore turn it into Kep’s signature dish: crab stir-fried with fistfuls of fresh green Kampot peppercorns still on the vine.

The squid was every bit as good. Stuffed and barbecued Kampot squid is such a favourite; we’ve come up with our own at-home version of the charred squid, ours packed with pork mince, noodles and aromatics.

But you don’t need to be anywhere near the beach to get your seafood fix. Head out after dark almost anywhere in the country, and you’ll smell the sizzle long before you see it. Whole fish are clamped between split bamboo sticks and grilled over charcoal until the skin blisters and chars, then served with fresh herbs, pickles and a punchy dipping sauce.

Squid gets similar treatment, skewered and brushed with sweet chilli or a garlicky glaze, while mobile carts sell dried squid that’s toasted, pressed flat and torn into chewy, smoky strips for snacking. Inland, freshwater river prawns are a real treat, grilled whole with a squeeze of lime, and you’ll often spot vendors selling paper bags of boiled cockles and snails, which locals prise open with a toothpick and dunk into chilli and lime. It’s messy, it’s cheap and it’s one of the best ways to eat like a local.

Eating insects in Cambodia: fried tarantulas and crispy crickets

Already suffering from a lack of sustenance at the end of the Vietnam War, Cambodia was plunged into a catastrophic famine following the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975. The Khmer Rouge forced its already malnourished people into slave labour on collective farms. The rice yields were insufficient to feed the population so consuming insects, a great source of nutrition, became the difference between life and death.

Despite Cambodia today forging a brighter new future, the popularity of creepy crawly cuisine hasn’t faltered, and insects remain a much-loved Cambodian street food. Indeed, eating insects is a culinary trend the UN Food and Agriculture Organization believes the rest of the world would be wise to acquire, as edible insects are not only healthy for our bodies but also the environment, producing significantly lower emissions than other proteins.

While you’ll find fried tarantulas all across the country, the town of Skuon, better known as Spiderville, is spider central. The market town, about 90 minutes from Phnom Penh on National Highway 6, is crawling with them. At least it would be if they weren’t already boiled, dusted in batter and fried in oil. When we stopped in Skuon, the spider ladies were out in force, their baskets piled high with tarantulas, and eager to turn Cambodia’s most notorious snack into our lunch. At first bite, the legs of the fried spiders are quite crunchy and not unlike a slightly hairy crisp, but the abdomen is another story. Soft and filled with a white meat, it does not taste even remotely like chicken, and I gave seconds a hard pass.

That’s not to say bugs are entirely off the menu for us. On a previous visit to Cambodia, we enjoyed a bug buffet at Bugs Café, an insect tapas restaurant in Siem Reap that turned the little crawling beasties into gourmet grub.

There were even actual grubs on the menu if you were partial to silkworm stir-fry. Our multi-course meal made use of scorpions, spiders, ants and crickets, and the entire meal, aside from a stomach-curling skewer of giant water bugs (that looked like cockroaches on steroids), was surprisingly delicious. Sadly, Bugs Café closed during the pandemic, but along Siem Reap’s Route 60, bug sellers still dish up all manner of creepy crawlies, tossed in fresh herbs and spices.

Night bites: Siem Reap and Phnom Penh’s late-night food scene 

If you want to eat your way around Siem Reap after dark, Pub Street is the obvious place to start. Yes, it is touristy, noisy and full of neon, but there’s a reason everyone ends up here. The streets around Pub Street and the Old Market are packed with restaurants, food stalls, bars and places serving everything from Khmer classics to cheap noodles, grilled meats and more adventurous snacks. It’s easy to wander, graze and follow your nose, although this is one part of Cambodia where you’re unlikely to be dining entirely alongside locals.

In Phnom Penh, the food scene is bigger, busier and much more spread out. Around the riverside and night market, you’ll find plenty of places to eat after dark, from stalls dishing up Cambodian snacks and grilled meats to restaurants serving traditional Khmer dishes and modern takes on them. The night market is particularly good for grazing, with tables and mats spilling into the open space and plenty of people stopping for a bite rather than sitting down for a formal meal. Phnom Penh also has a growing restaurant scene beyond the tourist areas, so if you’re willing to venture a little further, there’s considerably more to discover than the riverside’s familiar visitor fare.

Fine dining in Cambodia

It’s not all insects and street eats either. Cambodia’s fine dining scene has come of age, with a new generation of chefs taking Khmer classics, seasonal produce and forgotten recipes and turning them into tasting menus that could hold their own anywhere in the world.

For something a little more special, Lum Orng Restaurant should be at the top of your Siem Reap list. Billed as Cambodia’s first farm-to-table restaurant, it’s the domain of chef Sothea Seng, a farmer’s son who serves up what he calls New Mekong Cuisine using seasonal produce from his own organic gardens and farms, as well as local markets and growers across the region. Bookings are essential, and if you really want to push the boat out, the eight-seat Chef’s Table allows you to watch Chef Sothea cook dishes before they make it onto the menu.

Siem Reap has plenty more where that came from. Cuisine Wat Damnak, helmed by chef Joannès Rivière, combines local ingredients with contemporary French technique, and its menu changes every couple of weeks. It’s properly popular, so book as far ahead as you can. At Embassy, executive chef Kimsan Pol, a graduate of the Paul Dubrule and Sala Baï hospitality schools, leads an all-female team serving a seasonal tasting menu that pays homage to ancient Cambodian recipes and cooking methods. And for plant-based diners, JOMNO has become a beacon for vegetarian fine dining under chef Seiha Chomnab.

Phnom Penh holds its own too. Kimsan Pol has also brought her talents to the capital at Sombok, a Khmer fine dining restaurant on the riverfront run by an all-female team, with a fresh set menu every month. Kravanh, founded by two sisters, is widely loved for beautifully presented traditional Cambodian food at good value, while Malis is a polished spot for a dressed-up night of local flavours. And if you’re craving French, Topaz has been a Phnom Penh institution for more than two decades, frequented by diplomats, ministers and royalty, with a lush courtyard beneath an ancient banyan tree.

Cambodian restaurants with a social purpose

One of the nicest things about eating your way around Cambodia is how often dinner comes with a side of heart. We believe it is essential to give a little back to local communities when we travel and certainly found plenty of opportunities when travelling in Cambodia, especially when it came to food.

Social enterprise restaurants are dotted right across the country, from the tourist hubs to sleepy riverside towns, and many of them are training kitchens in disguise. Behind the pass and out on the floor, young Cambodians who might otherwise have missed out are learning the skills to build a career in hospitality, while others channel their profits into education, employment and community programmes. For visitors, it’s about the easiest way imaginable to make your holiday spending count.

Siem Reap is particularly good at this. HAVEN is a training restaurant for vulnerable young adults and young people from rural areas, teaching hospitality skills and giving trainees practical experience while you sit in a leafy garden working your way through the menu. At SPOONS Cafe Restaurant, profits go back into its training programmes and students, while New Leaf Eatery takes a slightly different tack, donating profits to education charities in Siem Reap and sharing a slice with its Khmer staff. Then there’s Marum, one of Friends-International’s training restaurants, where at-risk and marginalised young people learn the ropes as cooks and waitstaff while turning traditional recipes into shareable tapas in a candlelit garden. Adventurous eaters can take on the red ant stir-fry. Everyone else can just order more spring rolls.

Phnom Penh is where Friends-International opened Friends the Restaurant back in 2000, training at-risk and marginalised young Khmers for careers in the restaurant trade. The restaurant is now at the F3 centre near the National Museum and still a very good place to eat. Around the corner, Daughters of Cambodia Café takes a gentler coffee-and-cake approach, supporting women leaving the sex industry with vocational training, childcare, counselling and medical care. Your lunch might be a slice of cake, but the impact goes considerably further.

Down in Kampot, Epic Arts Cafe is part of the Epic Arts social enterprise and employs deaf and disabled Cambodians. It serves Cambodian and Western dishes alongside the sort of coffee, cake and breakfast that has a sneaky habit of turning a quick pit stop into a leisurely morning and possibly a second slice.

What I love about these places is that you’re not being asked to eat something mediocre because it’s for a good cause. They’re restaurants first. The food is good. The difference is that your lunch can also help create training, employment and opportunities for people who have had fewer of them. That’s a pretty good reason to pull up a chair.

Vegetarian and vegan food in Cambodia

At first glance, Cambodia might not seem like the easiest destination for vegetarians. Prahok, the famously funky fermented fish paste, is the backbone of Khmer cooking, and even an innocent-looking plate of vegetables can arrive carrying a sneaky dose of fish, oyster sauce or chicken stock, which means that if you’re vegetarian or vegan, leaving the meat off the plate does not necessarily make a vegetarian dinner.

The good news is that Cambodia has caught up considerably when it comes to plant-based eating. In Siem Reap, Phnom Penh and increasingly in places such as Kampot, you’ll find restaurants with dedicated vegetarian and vegan menus, from straightforward Khmer food to genuinely inventive contemporary cooking. There are also plenty of dedicated venues. In Siem Reap, try HeyBong, HAVEN or Banlle. Phnom Penh has fully vegan spots such as Bong Bonlai and Sundays, while Kampot has an especially good plant-based scene, with restaurants like Simple Things, Mettā Guesthouse and Deva Cafe.

Markets and local restaurants can require a little more detective work, but there are plenty of vegetable-based dishes to seek out. Stir-fried morning glory, vegetable curry, Cambodian vegetable soups, chive cakes, fresh spring rolls and simple plates of stir-fried greens are all good places to start. Tofu and mushrooms also feature on plenty of vegetarian menus. Just check what goes into any sauce, stock or seasoning before declaring dinner safely plant-based.

Vegetarians have a little more wriggle room, particularly if eggs and dairy are part of the deal. Vegans need to be more specific, especially with sauces and broths. And if you’re travelling with allergies as well as dietary restrictions, it’s worth being even more explicit.

The good news is that Khmer food doesn’t need meat to be interesting. Between the fresh herbs, coconut, lemongrass, turmeric, galangal, rice noodles and Kampot pepper (which, if you haven’t had it, will ruin supermarket pepper for you forever), there’s no shortage of flavour to go around.

So yes, you can eat brilliantly in Cambodia without a skerrick of meat. Ask a few questions, learn to love morning glory and don’t be surprised if you head home with a suitcase full of Kampot pepper and a newfound suspicion that vegetables were the real stars of the trip all along.

Cambodian food: need to know before you go

Cash is still king

Cards are increasingly accepted in hotels and upmarket restaurants, but cash is still the way to go for markets, street food, small local restaurants and roadside stops. Cambodian riel and US dollars are both widely used. You’ll often get change in a mixture of the two, so don’t be surprised to leave lunch with a pocketful of both.

Ordering food in Cambodia

English is widely spoken in tourist areas, but outside them a few words of Khmer, a translation app or a photo of what you’re after can make ordering considerably easier. If you have allergies or dietary restrictions, be particularly clear about what you can’t eat.

Drinking Water

It is absolutely vital to stick to bottled or treated water and check that bottles are properly sealed. Ice is generally fine in established restaurants and hotels but use a little more caution at street stalls.

Safe street food in Cambodia

Don’t be scared of eating on the street. Just look for busy stalls with plenty of local customers and food being cooked fresh in front of you. High turnover is your friend. Avoid raw foods and food stalls with dubious hygiene standards and if something has been sitting in the Cambodian sun since breakfast, give it a respectful nod and keep walking. You can avoid tummy bugs by following our safe eating mantra guide.

Tipping in Cambodia

Tipping isn’t traditionally compulsory in Cambodia, but it’s appreciated for good service, particularly in restaurants and cafes aimed at visitors. Check the bill first to see whether a service charge has already been added.

Looking for more Cambodian culinary inspiration? We’ve got you…

Noum Kong Cambodian Doughnuts
Cambodian inspired Lemongrass and Lime Fish Larb
Cambodian-style Stuffed Barbecue squid
Lum Orng: Siem Reap’s Unmissable Farm-to-Table Feast

 

 

 

 

The post Cambodian Food: A Guide to Khmer Cuisine, Dishes and Where to Eat in Cambodia appeared first on boyeatsworld.

Aqua Park. Image courtesy Panthers Penrith

Everyone pitches Penrith as the gateway to the Blue Mountains, but a stay at the Panthers Entertianment Precinct with kids means it’s also the gateway to big adventures.

Taking a teen for a weekend away requires a completely different holiday strategy. Scenic lookouts are suddenly “just rocks”, historic villages are apparently something people endured before Wi-Fi and suggesting a leisurely bushwalk makes the younger of my teens look at me like I’ve just announced the family is joining a cult.

So when I told her she could bring a friend for a weekend in Penrith, I purposely skipped the whole gateway-to-the-Blue-Mountains, scenic-Nepean-River pitch and led with the important stuff… skydiving, wakeboarding and zombies.

Our base was Pullman Sydney Penrith, right in the middle of The Panthers Entertainment Precinct, under an hour from the Sydney CBD. My plan was simple enough.  Park the car, keep the teenagers entertained and see how long it took before somebody announced they were bored. As it turned out, that announcement never came. Which was when I started to suspect Panthers might actually be a cult. Not in a sinister, hand-over-your-worldly-possessions kind of way. More in the hang about for 48 hours, and you’ll find yourself emotionally invested in the place sense. And given the devotion of some Panthers supporters, I suspect they would consider that a perfectly reasonable description of membership.

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Panthers Entertainment Precinct

Panthers Precinct.

Panthers World of Entertainment is one of the largest licensed clubs in the country, and over the years the Western Sydney institution has grown into a genuine entertainment precinct rather than just a club with a bistro. These days it’s home to Aqua Golf, an indoor skydiving centre, a full cable wake park with its own kids’ club, an amusement arcade, more than a dozen restaurants and bars and Penrith’s first five-star hotel, which sits right in the middle of it all. For families, that density is the whole point. You’re not driving between activities, you’re not researching where to eat each night, you’re just walking from one thing to the next.

Aqua Golf at Panthers Penrith

Aqua Golf © Aleney de Winter

We kicked things off at Aqua Golf, where you hit balls from the edge of a lake towards floating targets. It’s golf stripped of most of the things that can make golf feel like work, like walking, and there’s no need for a handicap, fancy outfit or any actual golfing ability. You just grab a club, a bucket of balls, pick a target and start swinging. The girls immediately turned it into a competition because apparently even a casual hit at a floating target requires a winner. I was not that winner. Though I didn’t expect to also be beaten by the four-year-old in the next lane.

Aqua Golf worked well for a first activity because it was easy-going enough to settle everyone into the weekend without requiring a whole afternoon. We had a laugh, tried to hit the targets and moved on when we’d had enough, although the girls were having such a good time taking the piss out of each other’s golf swings that the moving on bit wasn’t particularly urgent.

Most importantly, they were doing something together. No phones, no complaints about being bored and no requests to go back to the hotel. In fact, I was feeling so optimistic about this whole teenage weekend experiment I shot them into orbit.

Indoor skydiving at iFLY Downunder

iFly Downunder © Aleney de Winter

Well, not literally. But they were sent skywards. iFLY Downunder puts you inside a giant vertical wind tunnel and lets you fly without a plane or parachute, just a column of air standing between you and the laws of gravity.

There was a briefing, followed by helmets, goggles and flight suits. The girls looked kind of crazy in matching death row orange, particularly once the goggles had squashed their faces into something vaguely Muppet adjacent. The second they stepped into the tunnel, though, none of that mattered. Their instructor worked with them one at a time, helping them find their balance before gently taking them higher. There were nerves at first, of course, but they got the hang of things within minutes, and I could see the exact moment when the nerves gave way to huge grins as they realised they were actually flying.

By the time they came back down to earth, everyone was hungry.

Where to eat at Panthers Penrith

Marcel Bar & Bistro. Image courtesy of Panthers Penrith

We headed to Tori Cafe & Bar at Pullman for lunch, where a wagyu burger did the job of restoring enough energy for the next round of fun. Travelling with teenagers has taught me that food isn’t really a break from the itinerary. It is the infrastructure holding the itinerary together.

The good thing about Panthers is that food is never far away, and there is a ridiculous amount of it. You can go from burgers and seafood to steaks, hot pot, noodles and pizza without ever having to move the car, which is particularly useful when everyone is hungry at a different time and nobody can agree on what they want.

We had dinner at Marcel Bar & Bistro at The Pullman the first night, working our way through five fabulous courses, from crispy prawns with XO aioli and creamy burrata to sweet potato ravioli and a dessert that disappeared rather quickly. The food was excellent, and it was nice to sit somewhere that felt properly grown-up without the girls feeling as though they’d been subjected to a formal dinner.

Dinner at Marcels at Pullman Sydney Pentrith © Aleney de Winter

The following night we tried Alexander’s at Panthers, which turned out to be one of the surprises of the weekend. It’s a lively tapas and cocktail bar with live music, and our singer was so good that even the teenagers were properly listening instead of disappearing into their phones. We ordered a stack of tapas-style plates and proceeded to demolish them while the music carried on around us. It was the kind of place where dinner felt like part of the night rather than something you had to sit through before getting on with it.

There are plenty of other places to eat around the Panthers precinct too, from Kelly’s Bar + Kitchen and CJ’s Crab Shack & Grill to Tang Hot Pot, Five Guys, Italian Street Kitchen, Zen Noodle Bar and Brisket Boys. You could easily stay for a few days and eat somewhere different every night. And then there’s Harry’s Café de Wheels just outside the entrance, ready for the inevitable late-night pie and chips emergency. Because we all have those, right?

Five-star comfort at Pullman Sydney Penrith

© Pullman Sydney Penrith

We’re staying at Pullman Sydney Penrith, the region’s first international five-star hotel, tucked right into the Panthers precinct, with the club itself only a few minutes’ walk away. The building is curved and glass-heavy, designed to echo the nearby Nepean River, and inside it feels polished without being precious. Our room is properly spacious, with big, ridiculously comfortable beds that feel particularly good after a day spent being dragged around on boards. And the staff… well, they’re all absolute sweethearts!

The hotel has two dining spots, Marcel Bar & Bistro and Tori Café & Bar, plus a seriously well-equipped gym and a cedar sauna for anyone who has somehow still got energy left. There’s also 24-hour room service, which feels like a very sensible five-star amenity when you’ve spent the day getting wet, muddy or airborne.

There’s something reassuring about arriving back at a five-star hotel looking like you’ve been through a washing machine and nobody batting an eyelid. Two soggy, lake-scented teenagers wander through the lobby and the staff barely blink. Breakfast at Marcel is excellent too, with plenty of choice and enough substantial food to fuel another day of questionable decisions.

And then there’s the location. We could spend the day in the water, wander back to the hotel, shower, eat brilliantly and be in bed, without having to fish for the car keys once. For a family weekend, that feels pretty close to perfect.

→ Check current rates and availability at Pullman Sydney Penrith

Cables Wake Park at Panthers

Cables © Aleney de Winter

Ready for more adventure, the girls took on Cables Wake Park, which caters to everyone from total beginners to experienced riders training on the bigger of its two lakes. Neither girl had wakeboarded before, but their instructor was patient and encouraging, having Marlo up and riding on her first attempt, cue 30 minutes of thoroughly unearned confidence that lasts right up until they move over to the bigger lake and she goes down face first. Three times. So she downgraded to kneeboarding, fell off that too, then gave bellyboarding a crack. By then falling had basically become the sport. But it turned out faceplanting is her vibe because she was keen to do it all over again.

Which means we’ll be back, especially in summer when the weather warms up and Cables adds its Aqua Park to the mix. The enormous floating obstacle course is packed with inflatable slides, climbing walls, jumping pillows and various things seemingly designed purely to be bounced on, scrambled over or launched off. Pretty much heaven for a teenager who considers falling into water a perfectly good way to spend an afternoon.

Getting their FREAK on at Panthers

We finish the weekend with FREAK, because apparently the appropriate response to a weekend of wakeboarding, skydiving and generally throwing ourselves around is to get chased by zombies. FREAK is an immersive VR venue tucked inside the iFLY building, with free-roam games, VR escape rooms, laser tag and arcade-style experiences, all with 4D effects that make it considerably easier to forget you’re standing in a room in Penrith. The girls disappear into the virtual world and emerged comparing zombie kill counts, convinced they were the queens of zombie annihilation.

Then we made the mistake of going into Timezone. Or, more accurately, they told me they’d just have a quick look. There were driving games, shoot-em-ups, old-school arcade favourites and enough flashing lights and machines dispensing tickets to keep two teenagers occupied for considerably longer than I planned. They got competitive, obviously, collecting tickets and comparing scores while I stood there wondering how a quick look had somehow turned into an hour.

This was probably the right way to end the weekend, though. By that point we’ve done the big-ticket adventures, eaten extremely well and spent most of the weekend trying stuff none of us had done before. The last few hours were simply theirs. No itinerary, no rushing off to the next activity. Just zombies, arcade games and two BFFs having fun together.

Panthers provides a perfect weekend escape

© Aleney de Winter

The case I keep making to other parents when they ask how the weekend went is that Panthers solves the problem most family holidays run into… too much time spent getting somewhere, not enough time spent doing anything once you’ve arrived. It compresses genuine adventure, five-star comfort and properly good food into one walkable precinct, under an hour from the Sydney CBD, with the added bonus of sitting close to Western Sydney’s new international airport for anyone flying in rather than driving.

And for families with teenagers, it offers something that’s genuinely hard to find elsewhere… activities that are challenging rather than childish, enough independence that they’re not glued to a parent’s side, and enough shared moments that it still feels like a family trip rather than a drop-off.

I came home having done far less falling than the girls and far more watching than I expected.But  I’d also somehow become the person suggesting we come back, which was mildly concerning given I’d started the weekend wondering whether this place was a cult. Turns out it might be. And one I’m quite happy to join.

Panthers Entertainment Precinct – need to know

Getting there: Panthers is roughly 50 minutes’ drive from the Sydney CBD, with train stations at both Penrith and Kingswood nearby if you’d rather not drive at all.

What to book ahead: iFLY and Cables Wake Park sessions are worth booking online in advance, particularly on weekends.

The post Panthers Penrith with kids: The ultimate family weekend in Western Sydney appeared first on boyeatsworld.

Keep Portland Wierd © Aleney de Winter

Portland, Oregon, has built a reputation for being weird. Look closer and you’ll find something more interesting… a city shaped by individuality, counterculture and a remarkable willingness to let people be themselves.

Most cities want you to arrive with a good excuse for being strange. Portland wants to know what kind of strange, so it can point you towards your people.

Those people might include the guy in the flapping vampire cape dancing down the street like he has somewhere very important to haunt. Or the one dressed as Darth Vader, riding a unicycle and playing bagpipes that shoot fire. Or the man in the purple cowboy hat, well, honestly, purple everything, playing chess with kids at the Portland Saturday Market. They might have blue hair, green hair or neon pink hair. But they could just as easily have mousy brown hair and be wearing a navy twinset and sensible beige trousers, ordering coffee right alongside someone in six layers of velvet and rainbow socks.

Because that’s the thing about Portland, Oregon. Nobody here is particularly interested in asking you to tone yourself down. Or up. Nobody’s asking why, full stop. Portland has spent decades making room for the oddballs, outsiders, artists, activists and people who simply don’t fit neatly into the box. The weirdness is what you see. The acceptance underneath it is what makes the city interesting.

And maybe that’s why the only question anyone seems interested in asking in this city is what you’re doing later… and whether you’ve eaten, which, let’s face it, is probably going to be somewhere weird.

This article contains affiliate links. If you book through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

A history of acceptance

Steel bridge in Portland’s historic Old Town © Aleney de Winter

The instinct for making room for people who don’t quite fit goes back a lot further than the Keep Portland Weird bumper stickers you see slapped on every second Subaru.

In Old Town, the city’s historic core, you can still trace the outlines of an earlier Portland shaped by logging and timber workers dragging felled trees down greased wooden skid roads towards the mills. When the work dried up, those same workers ended up in the cheap hotels and saloon-heavy streets nearby. By the 1890s, the neighbourhood had acquired the name Skid Row, a phrase that would eventually travel far beyond Portland to describe places where hard luck had gathered. My point isn’t that Skid Row was some early example of Portland being wonderfully accepting. That would be pushing the history too far. The point is that Portland’s story has long involved making physical and social room for people living outside the polished mainstream.

In 1970, Portland pulled off something that sounds less like political smarts and more like the local government had been gargling bong water. You see, Nixon was due in town. The FBI told Oregon Governor Tom McCall that tens of thousands of anti-war protesters might show up at the same time, with the kind of powder-keg potential that had turned the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago into a literal bloodbath. But McCall’s move was not to lock the city down. Instead, he handed the hippies a state park. The result was Vortex I, which ran for a week at Milo McIver State Park, with the state paying for it and police instructed to intervene only when things became genuinely dangerous. Bands played. Food co-ops fed people. Community clinics treated the crowd. Somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 people showed up. Nixon cancelled his visit. McCall figured he’d just destroyed his political career.  He won re-election in a landslide. Duh.

Portland, out loud

Alberta Arts District © Aleney de Winter

The same instinct shows up in Portland’s queer history, although here the story is less about one left-of-field political stunt and decades of people simply refusing to disappear. Sam Adams became the first openly gay mayor of a major American city in 2008.

Long before that, for more than fifty years, Walter Cole performed as Darcelle XV at the club that carried his name, working his way from local curiosity to load-bearing civic institution. Darcelle XV Showplace eventually landed on the National Register of Historic Places, while Cole was recognised by Guinness as the world’s oldest performing drag queen before his death in 2023. When he died in 2023, Portland named a downtown plaza for him, carving his name permanently into its own map.

Portland never developed one neat, designated gay village. Queer life spread through the city instead, becoming part of the broader anything-goes character, and that same sense of acceptance is still visible everywhere from Harvey Milk Street in downtown to Alberta Street in Northeast Portland, where queer-friendly businesses, artists and performers sit comfortably alongside galleries, vintage shops, bars and the neighbourhood’s general bohemian chaos.

Keep Portland Weird

There’s something wonderfully Portland about the way all its history just sits next to itself, unbothered. A drag performer becomes a civic landmark. A Republican governor solves a protest crisis by throwing a festival. A record-store owner decides his city needs more weird and starts printing that opinion onto bumper stickers.

That record-store owner was Terry Currier, who in 2003 started handing out Keep Portland Weird stickers, an idea he’ll happily admit he nicked straight off Austin. What started as a scrappy small-business campaign to keep people shopping local mutated into something bigger, and somewhere along the way it stopped being about commerce entirely and turned into a civic permission slip. And Portland has never been particularly subtle about what that permission looks like.

What counts as weird in Portland?

If you’re searching for weird things to do in Portland, this is where it gets fun. The city doesn’t have one particular flavour of weird, and that’s probably the point. You can spend the morning in a museum devoted to the bizarre, stumble across a tiny park with its own leprechaun mythology, eat a doughnut shaped like a voodoo doll and finish the day watching grown adults race homemade soapbox cars down a hill. None of it feels particularly out of place here.

Where weird gets to thrive

Paxton Gate © Aleney de Winter

Making room for people with unusual ideas shows up in the places Portland has allowed them to create. Some of the best weird things to do in Portland are really just encounters with the city’s imagination. Weird isn’t tucked away in some designated corner of town. It gets a shopfront, a museum, a patch of riverbank, a cinema, a garden or whatever other space someone can dream up and persuade the city to leave alone.

There’s the Freakybuttrue Peculiarium, a museum crammed with aliens, a life-sized Bigfoot and an entire alien autopsy set up for photos. The gift shop alone is worth the visit for the sheer volume of things you didn’t know you needed. Over on Mississippi Avenue, Paxton Gate serves up soaps, scents and candles alongside taxidermy giraffes and mounted beetles, all displayed with the calm of a shop that may just be the secret love child of Martha Stewart and Morticia Addams.

Twenty minutes north of the city, out on Sauvie Island, where the farmland meets the river, someone, or thing, dragged an old boat out to sit in the shallows, spray-painted to look like a crashed UFO, and just left it there. Nobody claims it, nobody explains it, you just walk through a stretch of trees near the beach…. and there she is in all her clapped-out spacecraft glory.

Back in town, Movie Madness holds more than 90,000 titles on actual physical media, but the real reason to go is the glass cases scattered through the store, the actual knife from Psycho, a bar of soap David Fincher personally donated from Fight Club and a prosthetic ear from Blue Velvet that reportedly still has some of David Lynch’s real hair stuck to it. Keep walking towards the back and you’ll hit a section labelled, with zero irony, Bizarre. Because things can always get weirder in Portland.

Even little weirdos are catered to in Portland. The Portland Aquarium has never had a single fish in it. No tanks, no water, not even a puddle, just one local artist’s six immersive biomes of hand-drawn sea creatures with their own soundtracks and a hidden character the kids hunt down room by room. It’s basically the vegan version of an aquarium… all imagination, zero animals and beloved by kids and their grownups alike.

Trolls and Leprechauns and Witches, Oh My!

The Witch’s House. Photo by Li-Ling Chang on Unsplash

The same impulse that makes room for a man in a purple cowboy hat also makes room for a bridge nobody’s allowed to explain. Not every bit of Portland’s weirdness needs a name or a face. Some of the best of it is just whimsy left out in the open for anyone willing to go looking.

Somewhere on a quiet railway trestle at the edge of town, for no reason anybody’s ever properly explained, people have spent years tying tiny plastic trolls to the underside of the bridge, one at a time, just because.

Mill Ends Park is a two-foot-wide patch of Portland pavement that spent decades claiming the title of the world’s smallest park… until a patch of ground in Japan finally pipped it in December 2024, with Guinness recognising the new record in 2025. It began when journalist Dick Fagan looked out his office window in 1946, spotted an empty hole in the road median where a light pole was supposed to go and decided a leprechaun had granted him a park. He planted flowers, named it Mill Ends and gave the resident leprechaun, Patrick O’Toole, a backstory. Over the years, the tiny park has hosted snail races, rose plantings, a butterfly swimming pool and, in a feat of completely unnecessary engineering, a miniature Ferris wheel lowered in by crane. Because Portland always commits hard to the bit.

The city’s whimsical streak doesn’t stop there. Deep in gorgeous Forest Park sits the Witch’s Castle, a mossy stone ruin that looks like it should be home to a coven of witches, a troll or at least a grumpy goblin. But it is simply a former public toilet, abandoned and later christened the Witch’s Castle by teenagers who apparently looked at a derelict shitter in the woods and thought, yep, that’s a witch’s castle. Because give Portland a crumbling toilet in the forest and they can even turn that into folklore.

Let it all hang out

Zoobomb Pyle © Aleney de WInter

Once a year, the city really lets it all hang out. Literally. More than 10,000 people nude up for the World Naked Bike Ride, technically a protest against oil dependency, but mostly just an excuse to be gloriously, defiantly starkers in public.

Every Sunday night, a different crowd rides kids’ bikes, the smaller the wheels the better, down from the zoo through the West Hills in the pitch dark at speeds that should really require a licence. It’s called Zoobomb, and the city liked it so much they commissioned a seventeen-foot sculpture downtown just to store the tiny bikes in between rides, a gold-plated toddler’s bicycle mounted on a spiral pillar in the middle of a traffic island. Somewhere a city planner signed off on that with a completely straight face.

In April, a third crowd descends on a leafy roundabout in Ladd’s Addition for the Ladds 500, where the whole point is riding around the same roundabout 500 times, dressed as dinosaurs, gnomes or whatever else seemed like a good idea that morning, under a motto the organiser is happy to put his name to…. let’s do something stupid,

And come August, fully grown adults haul homemade soap cars; past entries have included Batmobiles, Flintstones cars and a giant slice of cheese driven by two helmeted mice, to the top of Mt Tabor and let physics do the rest while everyone else drinks and watches from the grass.

Eat weird

Hawthorne Asylum © Aleney de Winter

Even the food here comes with an invitation attached. Whatever you’re hungry for, however strange your taste runs, there’s a plate, a cart or a whole neighbourhood in Portland built specifically to feed it. There are food-cart pods that turned spare patches of asphalt into places where cooks could build businesses without first finding the money for a traditional restaurant. Hawthorne Asylum is one of the biggest, with more than 20 carts, a beer hall, fire pits and coffee served from an actual aeroplane fuselage. And yes, it is named after the asylum that once stood on the site because Portland saw no reason to let a perfectly good former psychiatric hospital go to waste.

Near the Burnside Bridge, which separates Portland’s east and west sides, there’s Voodoo Doughnut, and at 1am the queue still snakes down the block, like everyone in it has been personally hexed into doughnut obsession. Across the road, the Keep Portland Weird mural looks straight down the queue, like it’s keeping tabs. Their most famous doughnut is shaped like a little voodoo doll, jam leaking out where a pretzel stick’s been jammed through it like a stake through the heart. Good for you? Absolutely not. Worth standing in line at 1am for? Obviously. Did I buy the T-shirt too? Also obviously.

Around the corner is a custard shop that isn’t just a custard shop. Order your ice cream at Black Cat Frozen Custard like a normal person… or whisper the right password and a door swings open onto Conspirator’s Coffee, a full speakeasy dressed up like somebody’s snowbound Victorian drawing room. Then there’s Raven’s Manor, a haunted mansion themed restaurant and cocktail bar that takes the opposite approach. There’s no secret door because the whole place looks like it might already be hiding a body. Filled with haunted dolls, gothic rooms and bartenders serving cocktails in smoking beakers and skulls, there’s even an interactive elixir experience involving a fictional 19th-century doctor who kidnapped his guests and experimented on them in pursuit of immortality. Because Portland looked at the idea of a normal cocktail bar and thought, no, what this really needs is a deranged Victorian physician.

And if you’re vegan, vegetarian, or just done pretending a lettuce leaf counts as a starter, Portland rewards with meat-free, dairy-free, entirely plant-based everything and manages to make it feel like the main event rather than the sad table in the corner. There’s a vegan strip club here. Yes, a vegan strip club. There are scores of restaurants doing it properly… and serving everything from vegan tacos and ramen to Southern fried “chicken” that’ll have you double-checking the menu. For people who scour other cities for a single decent cube of tofu, this is basically the promised land. Whatever you eat, or don’t, you’ll find a seat at the table.

Everyone gets a seat at the bar, literally 

Throwing snakes Weird bar tour © Aleney de Winter

The bars in Portland are brilliant, but if you want to understand Portland’s special brand of weird, spend an evening with Dresden de Vera of Throw Snakes Tours. Seriously. This man is a force of nature… and should probably run for president.

It was one of the best tours I’ve ever done with possibly the best tour guide in America ( no exageration). The bars we visited (and there were a lot) were great. They weren’t the obvious tourist drinking holes, instead Dresden took us to local places packed with personality, introducing us to Portland’s stranger corners and filling the walk between them with stories, local gossip and the sort of observations you only get from someone who genuinely loves his city.

But Dresden was what made the night. He’s funny, ridiculously charismatic, appears to know absolutely everyone and possesses some kind of social superpower. He took a group of eight complete strangers from different countries, ages and walks of life, made us feel included without forcing the fun and, by the end of the night, had somehow turned us into a bunch of mates who were happily sharing inner truths we hadn’t even shared with our closest friends.

That is an extraordinary trick.

If you’re travelling solo, this would be an especially good way to meet people. If you’re travelling with someone, you’ll still probably still end up chatting to half the group. And if you want to see the Portland behind the Keep Portland Weird slogan, this is a pretty bloody good place to start.

→ Check current rates and availability for Portland’s Weird Bar Crawl 

What makes Portland different?

Portland Saturday Markets © Aleney de Winter

Portland’s weirdness isn’t really about being strange for the sake of it. It’s what happens when people are given a bit of room to be themselves, whether that’s an artist with an idea nobody else quite gets, a drag queen who becomes a civic institution or a bunch of cyclists who think riding tiny bikes downhill in the dark sounds like a perfectly sensible Sunday night. The weirdness is the visible bit. The willingness to make room for it is what matters.

Of course, none of this means Portland is some flawless utopia where the world’s most glorious weirdos hold hands singing kumbaya beneath a rainbow. The city has had its share of serious problems, including downtown vacancies and social challenges that have tested the very idea of the welcoming city it sees itself as. But it hasn’t lost the need to make room for people, ideas and odd little corners of life that might get flattened elsewhere.

Maybe that’s what makes Portland interesting. Not the fact that it’s a little weird. Plenty of places have weird people, weird museums and people willing to set their own musical instruments on fire (well, maybe not that). Portland’s trick is making the weirdness feel like belonging.

So many people who call this quirky city home weren’t born here. Portland has long been a city of transplants. And that’s not really about location or cost of living. Though nobody’s going to complain about either. It’s because this is a place people move to when wherever they started out didn’t quite know what to do with them. Portland didn’t ask any of them to arrive polished or explain themselves before they were allowed in. It invited them to come as they are.

Somewhere among the drag queens, the hippies, the food-cart obsessives, the book nerds, the record-store romantics and the 10,000 people who turn up naked on bicycles every June, I stopped looking at Portland as a city and started seeing it as a collection of people who had figured out how to leave a little room for one another.

And it turns out, that room was big enough for me too.

Where to stay if you want to keep your Portland visit weird

Speaking of rooms. Portland’s weirdness doesn’t have to end when you check out of the last strange museum or finish your third suspiciously inventive doughnut. There are some equally unconventional places to sleep, from a luxury hotel with naked mannequins to a former school, a village of tiny houses and a hotel with a serious rock’n’roll fixation.

The Nines | More luxe than loopy

If you fancy something a little more luxurious than weird after a day exploring Portland’s stranger side, I adored The Nines. Housed in the grand old Meier & Frank department store building, it’s gorgeous, centrally located and effortlessly cool, with a soaring atrium, terrific art and some very good food. There are a few naked mannequins thrown in for good measure, because even luxury hotels in Portland need a touch of weird. The rooftop Departure bar has a slightly surreal airport-lounge-meets-cocktail-bar vibe, while the al fresco deck comes with stunning city views. I could, and did, spend far too much time up there.

→ Check current rates and availability 

McMenamins Kennedy School | Where detention comes with a soaking pool

If you’d rather keep the quirky mood going, McMenamins Kennedy School takes the whole “Portland does things differently” idea considerably further. I loved this former elementary school turned hotel, which sat empty for nearly two decades after it closed in 1975 until neighbourhood residents fought to save it. McMenamins eventually transformed it into a hotel, keeping much of the old school intact. The classrooms, complete with chalkboards and cloakrooms, are now guest rooms, the old cafeteria is a restaurant and quirky bars have been tucked into various corners. Even the former girls’ bathroom has been turned into a brewery, which feels like a fairly Portland solution.

→ Check current rates and availability 

Tiny Digs | Adorably unusual

Then there’s Tiny Digs, where the hotel rooms are actually 12 individually designed tiny houses clustered around a shared outdoor space. There’s a Beach House, a Barn, a Boho Wagon, a Finlandia and even a Rock ‘n’ Roll House. It’s basically a tiny-house village for people who want to try the small-life thing without giving up their suitcase.

→ Check current rates and availability 

McMenamins Crystal Hotel | Rock’n’roll eccentricity

And McMenamins Crystal Hotel is another Portland oddity worth knowing about. The 1911 flatiron building sits across from the Crystal Ballroom and its 51 rooms are each inspired by a song or performance from the ballroom’s history. There’s also a subterranean saltwater soaking pool for hotel guests, which sounds like a pretty decent way to end a day in Portland.

→ Check current rates and availability 

For more USA inspiration, tips and travel guides, try these…

What to Eat in Washington, DC: From streets eats to Michelin stars
McMenamins Kennedy Shcool Guide
What to Eat in Washington, DC: From streets eats to Michelin stars
Explore Skaneateles: New York’s most charming Finger Lakes town
Niagara Falls New York Travel Guide: What to see, do and expect
Family-friendly festivals in New Orleans
48 Hours in Denver with Kids
Why California is America’s ultimate family playground
52 reasons to visit Anaheim with kids
48 hours in Houston with kids
The Ultimate Boston Travel Guide
How to spend 48 hours in Salem, Massachusetts

The post The weird genius of Portland, Oregon appeared first on boyeatsworld.

Kennedy School in NE Portland © McMenamins

McMenamins Kennedy School is a century-old Portland elementary school turned hotel, with a brewery in the old girls’ loo, a jazz-themed secret room and detention served with a side of whisky. I mean, obviously I had to check it out. 

I got sent to my room… then took a dip and moved bars twice, and nobody, not once, told me to sit up straight. Which is lucky, because several bevvies in, I’m not sure I could have. Welcome to McMenamins Kennedy School, the Portland hotel where being kept after class is the whole point.

Officially, I was there for an art tour. Unofficially, the bars, the pool and the bevvies staged a fairly successful coup.

The building, on NE 33rd Avenue in Portland’s Concordia neighbourhood, still looks much as it did when it opened more than a century ago… a proper Italian Renaissance Revival-style school with warm walls and long wings stretching out either side of a colonnaded entrance. Except instead of kids racing for the bell, it’s guests wandering the halls in dressing gowns, with no hurry to be anywhere.

This article contains affiliate links. If you book through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

The history of McMenamins Kennedy School, Portland’s converted school hotel

Kennedy School © Aleney de Winter

The Kennedy School’s story starts in 1913, two years before the present building opened, when the first classes were held in portable one-room buildings on the site. There were just 29 children. The location was considered pretty remote, sitting three blocks beyond the end of the nearest streetcar line. It was apparently rural enough that an ordinance prohibited people from shooting rabbits from the streetcar. No, seriously… this is Portland.

The school opened its doors in 1915, named for local landowner John Daniel Kennedy, who donated artwork for the school’s 1916 dedication, and for the next sixty-odd years it did exactly what schools do. Though it moonlighted as pretty much everything else in town too. When classes weren’t running, Kennedy doubled as the neighbourhood’s town hall, a polling place on election day, a Red Cross blood drive venue and a spot for paper and tin can collection drives. It also served as a weekend playground and a flood-relief shelter. This was never just a building where kids learned long division. It was where a whole neighbourhood happened.

Which is why, when the beloved school finally shut its doors in 1975 due to dwindling enrolment, the neighbourhood took it just about as well as you’d expect. Technically, the school continued to be used as a temporary facility for other Portland schools until 1980, when it finally closed completely.

The city took one look at the ageing building and reached for the wrecking ball, but former students, past PTA presidents and a stubborn coalition of neighbours spent years fighting off demolition order after demolition order… because nobody in Concordia was prepared to let their old school become a car park without a fight. Several ideas were floated for the empty building, including a retirement home and, bafflingly, an indoor soccer facility, before Portland natives Mike and Brian McMenamin, who’d already made a habit of adopting condemned buildings the way some people adopt strays, bought the school in spring 1997.

A few months later, the original principal’s bell was rung on the front steps to mark the reopening as the very Portland and utterly unique Kennedy School Hotel, just the kind of theatrical flourish this building deserves.

Art that turns every hallway into a gallery

Words of Wisdom by J. Joy at Kennedy School © Aleney de WInter

Once you’re inside, you understand the fuss. McMenamins employs a company historian, Tim Hills, whose job on this project was tracking down blueprints, old class photos and firsthand memories from former students and teachers, then handing all of it over to a small army of artists, nearly fifty of them over the years, to turn into paintings, mosaics and wood panels covering every wall, ceiling and doorway in the building. The house style has earned its own nickname, historical surrealism, because every piece is anchored to something that genuinely happened here and then given just enough creative licence to make you stop mid-stride and squint at a wall.

The first stop on our art tour, right by the main entrance, sets the tone. Four bas-relief panels flank the doorway, and they turn out to be full-size reproductions of Luca della Robbia’s 15th-century masterworks, originally made for a cathedral in Florence. They were cast in Boston and gifted to the school for its 1916 dedication by John Daniel Kennedy, the school’s namesake, then spent time on display at the Portland Art Museum before McMenamins restored and reinstalled them in their original spot in 1997. Children dance, play trumpets and drums and read, exactly as they would have for a Renaissance cathedral, except now they’re watching guests wheel suitcases past them instead of monks.

Then for no apparent reason other than that McMenamins love a little whimsy, there’s a bronze gong display, which I am quite taken with.

Lobby artwork © Aleney de Winter

There are plenty of original details lurking behind the art. The former classrooms still have chalkboards and cloak rooms, original 1915 bas-relief panels survive… even the kid-sized drinking fountains are still there. It means you keep getting little jolts of the building’s actual past among the murals and mosaics, rather than feeling as though you’re walking through a hotel decorated to look like an old school.

The painting Words of Wisdom, by J. Joy, is an good example of the way Kennedy School’s artists fold the building’s history into the artwork. Another smaller painting called “My Modigliani” was painted by Carol Manfredi, a 1949 Kennedy School graduate, as a tribute to her old art teacher, Mrs Stella Pietila. Manfredi went on to study art formally and realised, years later, that her tall, long-necked teacher had always resembled the elongated figures painted by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, so she tucked a small replica of one of his works over Mrs Pietila’s shoulder.

A little further on again is a genuinely serious piece among all the whimsy, a triptych by the late Portland artist Charlotte Lewis that’s part tribute to the Yoruba religion and part portrait of jazz legend John Coltrane, painted in gold script with lines from a traditional West African prayer. It’s one of several Coltrane and jazz-themed works scattered through the building, a thread that Kennedy School has clearly kept pulling on.

One of my favourites is something altogether more playful, a Punch & Judy-style puppet theatre facade. It’s a wonderfully unexpected little piece to find tucked among the murals, mosaics and photographs of a former Portland school.

Where to drink at McMenamins Kennedy School

The Boiler Room at Kennedy School © McMenamins

The building’s sense of humour never lets up. Reception is in the old principal’s office, which makes checking in the first time in your life that a summons to the principal’s office has ever been good news.

Then there are the bars. Lots of them. McMenamins has managed to tuck drinking spots into former classrooms, the old boiler room and, naturally, the girls’ bathroom, so wandering the school with a drink in hand feels less like going to a hotel bar and more like discovering the school has developed a very serious drinking problem.

The onsite Concordia Brewery operates out of what used to be a girls’ bathroom, thoroughly renovated, of course, though there’s something delightfully Portland about ordering a flight of beers from a converted loo and being asked if you’d like tasting notes. The pink tiling on the walls has been left exactly as it was, a small, deliberate wink at the room’s former life, and the artwork on the brew kettles carries the joke further still, with two stern principals, two long-suffering early students and, high in the south-west corner, a painted recreation of an old rite of passage. Kennedy boys used to fling open the door and sprint the length of the unusually long room, hoping to make it out the far side before a teacher caught them.

Down in the basement sits the Boiler Room bar… all exposed pipework and industrial charm, doing the heaviest lifting of anywhere in the building for pure atmosphere. The pipes and radiator railings snaking around the stairs were welded together in 2008 by Jeff Allen, a McMenamins plumber with an artist’s eye, using salvaged fixtures from the company’s other historic properties. But before any of that, it was the domain of a real school janitor named Steve Hutton, a bagpipe-playing Scotsman remembered by students for teaching students the Highland Fling and, more improbably, for showing a kid with a freshly shattered left wrist how to throw right-handed instead. That kid, Don Johnson, went on to pitch for the New York Yankees.

There’s Detention, which used to be the janitor’s room. The old wood-burning stove is still parked in the corner, decades cold, like a retired staff member nobody had the heart to move on. I spent a very happy stretch of my afternoon there, day drinking in a room that once smelled of mop buckets, feeling like I’d finally cracked the code on what detention should have been in a perfect world.

The Honors Bar © McMenamins

If Detention is where the naughty kids go, Honors Bar is for the ones who actually did their homework. Tucked into another cosy little room, it’s deliberately scholarly, with classical and operatic music playing while the grown-ups work their way through cocktails, beer, wine and spirits. It’s also adults-only, so despite the gold-star theme, this is one classroom where the kids aren’t getting in.

Cypress Room has a completely different personality. The former classroom is now a rum-loving little hideaway, with an extensive international rum selection, a full menu and island and reggae music that may even be spinning on vinyl. There’s a Bob Marley quote painted above the bar, plus a patio out back for warmer days.

There’s also the Courtyard Restaurant, occupying the old cafeteria and spilling outside into the courtyard. It’s more restaurant than drinking den, with a full-service bar, so it’s a good option when you want an actual meal with your drink rather than another round of wandering-school-with-a-pint.

And if you’re heading to the movie theatre, you don’t even have to abandon the booze. The Kennedy School Theater Bar occupies the former classroom that serves as the cinema’s lounge and lobby, where you can grab a drink, pizza or popcorn and have it delivered to your table during the film.

By this point, you may have noticed a problem. There are enough places to drink at Kennedy School that you can genuinely spend an afternoon moving from one to the next without ever having to leave the building. Which, tbh, is probably the best reason to stay a night or two.

Ghost stories (allegedly)

Whimsical features © Aleney de Winter.

Stick around long enough and someone is bound to mention the ghosts. Because of course they will. The McMenamins Kennedy School Hotel has a reputation as one of the more haunted McMenamins properties going, and the stories cluster in oddly specific spots. A tap on the foot in the middle of the night in one particular guestroom, the sound of children laughing near where the old maypole dances were held and a women’s bathroom off the main hallway that’s earned a name as the property’s unofficial ghost sighting hotspot. There’s even a painting of a girl, based on an old class photo, that folk will tell you is haunted. More than one guest swears they’ve seen her sitting in a chair nearby in the same ‘fit, right down to the bows on her shoes.

None of this is documented in the building’s official history; it’s more anecdote and folklore. But it is a very old school, it was after dark, and I am, at my deepest core, a bona fide coward, and I’d had enough McMenamins ales for my imagination to be firing. So in the hallway between bars, I may or may not have moved fast enough to achieve a personal best.

The Testimony Secret Room at the Kennedy School

The Testimony Secret Room @ Aleney de WInter

Somewhere in the building, if you’re patient and a bit lucky with your timing, there’s also a secret room. The Testimony Secret Room only opened in December 2025, an entire hidden installation dedicated to jazz legend Charlie Parker, painted floor to ceiling in glow-in-the-dark paint. It’s more than just an abstract homage to Jazz, Charlie Parker actually played Portland as part of a now-vanished jazz scene that once thrived along Williams Avenue, a few kilometres from where Kennedy School stands today.

The installation itself is based on Yusef Komunyakaa’s 1997 work Testimony, which explores Parker’s life, with fluorescent and phosphorescent paintings, colourful cityscapes based on places Parker lived and performed, portraits of musicians he influenced and 14 scrolls carrying words from Komunyakaa’s work. The three artists behind it, Eona Skelton, Cleo Hehn and Myrna Yoder, started by painting the ceiling, seventeen feet up, with stars in varying shades of blacklight paint, so the whole room reads as a nightscape lit from above, fitting for a musician whose life was largely lived after dark.

The only clue McMenamins gives to find the room is that it isn’t always open, so you need to keep an eye on the operating hours of the smaller bars nearby to work out your window. It’s the strangest scavenger hunt I’ve ever half-heartedly attempted with a glass of wine in hand. And even then, I found it more by luck than design, which feels appropriate for a room dedicated to a man whose whole career ran on improvisation.

Family amenities at McMenamins Kennedy School

Kennedy School Theater © McMenamins

Families will love this hotel because it’s an utterly unique proposition and welcoming to every member of your crew. It isn’t one bar; it’s several, each with its own name, its own hours and its own personality, which means the grown-up guests can genuinely wander from one to the next on a hotel pub crawl of sorts, while the kids are off doing something entirely different two hallways over.

Soaking Pool © McMenamins

Whether that’s soaking in a heated pool tiled in colourful ceramics, built where the old teachers’ lounge once stood… or watching a film in the movie theatre in the old auditorium (now stuffed with couches instead of hard little chairs). Somewhere in between there’s a gymnasium hosting live music and events instead of dodgeball and a restaurant that spills out into a proper courtyard where the old cafeteria used to be.

The rooms keep the bit going too. The guestrooms in the main building are genuinely former classrooms, chalkboards and cloakrooms still intact, which delights kids in a way that’s frankly a little insulting to modern whiteboards. The newer English Wing rooms sit in the courtyard with literary themes instead, so you can choose between sleeping in an old classroom or somewhere inspired by a book or author.

Is McMenamins Kennedy School worth staying at?

Kennedy School Room © McMenamins

Absolutely! Especially if you like your hotels with a bit of personality. You can sleep in a former classroom, wander the old school corridors, drink in the old janitor’s room, soak in the pool and spend half the night discovering bits of artwork you somehow missed five minutes earlier. Where else can you check into a hotel and still feel like you might get caught out of bed after lights-out?

It’s not sleek, polished hotel luxury and that’s rather the point. McMenamins Kennedy School is weird, warm and wonderfully lived-in, with enough history and little surprises to keep you poking around lfor your enture stay.

What to know before you go

Kennedy School Restaurant © McMenamins

The Kennedy School is the kind of hotel where it pays to arrive with a little time to spare. The building is big, the bars have different opening hours and the Testimony Secret Room isn’t always open, so don’t assume you’ll be able to tick everything off in one lap.

If you’re staying overnight, I’d also book a room for the experience rather than expecting conventional hotel luxury. The rooms are full of character, the corridors aren’t exactly minimalist and the whole place is designed for wandering, drinking, eating and poking your nose into things you probably weren’t looking for.

And wear sensible shoes. You’ll do a surprising amount of wandering around this place and, if you’re like me, you’ll end up wandering half a kilometre looking for the secret bar you were sitting approximately 10 metres from for the previous hour.

History lessons

I came for the art and left thinking mostly about the people who wouldn’t let a tired old building quietly become a car park. I came away thinking about how easily this could have been a very different story. Every glowing mural and every stone-cold stove in this place exists because a neighbourhood decided their school was worth an argument.

More than four decades later, I got to get sozzled at school, on a school night, and get away with it. I did not get detention, though I did enjoy a quiet ale in the room that used to hand it out. That’s got to be worth an A+

→ Check current rates and availability at McMenamins Kennedy School

McMenamins Kennedy School
5736 NE 33rd Ave, Portland,
OR 97211.
Ph: (503) 249-3983.

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The weird genius of Portland, Oregon
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The post McMenamins Kennedy School: Inside Portland’s Converted School Hotel appeared first on boyeatsworld.

Photo by Yanhao Fang on Unsplash

From soaking in ancient hot springs and sleeping in Buddhist temples to forest bathing, pilgrimage trails and getting buried in hot sand, Japan has some wonderfully weird ways to make you feel better.

I’m a bit of a Japan junky. I seem to need an annual Japan fix, and over the years I’ve discovered that Japan has a remarkable knack for making me feel good. I’m not entirely sure when wellness became part of the deal, but apparently I’m here now. Once upon a time, my Japan trips were mostly about eating whatever I liked, drinking too much plum wine and obsessing over all the kawaii cuteness and cultural overload. These days, I’m considerably more interested in anything that leaves me feeling better than when I arrived.

Happily, Japan has some wonderfully strange ways of making that happen. You can soak yourself in an ancient hot spring, wander through a forest communing with nature, sit cross-legged in a Zen temple or spend several days walking an ancient pilgrimage route. Or perhaps you’d rather sleep in a Buddhist temple, eat like a monk and, if that all sounds a little too sensible, head south and have yourself buried up to the neck in hot volcanic sand because… well, why the heck not?

The Japanese approach to wellness is deeply woven into everyday life, from onsen and simple seasonal food to meditation, nature and rituals that have been around for centuries. And while some of it is deeply peaceful, some of it is downright peculiar. Here’s where to start.

This article contains affiliate links. If you book through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Onsen hot spring bathing

Japan has more than 3,000 hot spring areas, so if your idea of wellness involves getting naked and sitting in very hot water with a bunch of strangers, you are absolutely spoilt for choice.

Onsen is one of the country’s great bathing traditions, with hot spring towns scattered from Hokkaido to Kyushu. Some are attached to ryokans, some are public bathhouses and others are gloriously scenic outdoor pools where you can soak surrounded by mountains, forests or snow.

If you want to make the ryokan experience part of your wellness escape, Hakone Kowakien Mikawaya Ryokan, near Tokyo ,is a particularly lovely choice. The birthplace of Kowakudani Onsen, this historic inn has its own free-flowing hot-spring source, traditional gardens and open-air baths, making the bath itself part of the experience.

→ Check current rates and availability at Hakone Kowakien Mikawaya Ryokan

And in Kyoto, Hanaikada sits beside the Togetsukyo Bridge in Arashiyama, with its own hot spring, open-air baths and traditional kaiseki dining.

→ Check current rates and availability at Hanaikada

Whichever you choose, there is some onsen etiquette to learn first. The edited highlights? You strip off, wash, climb into steaming water with a bunch of naked strangers and basically cook yourself until you emerge feeling like someone has hit the reset button. Different springs contain different minerals, and traditionally these mineral-rich waters are believed to have benefits ranging from soothing aching muscles and joints and improving circulation to helping certain skin conditions. Whether you credit the minerals, the heat or simply spending half an hour doing absolutely nothing, it is hard to argue with the restorative appeal.

For the full atmospheric experience, head to Dogo Onsen in Matsuyama on Shikoku. The Dogo Onsen Honkan is one of Japan’s oldest and most famous bathhouses, with a history stretching back more than 3,000 years. It is also famously associated with Spirited Away, although Hayao Miyazaki has never confirmed it was the direct inspiration for the film’s bathhouse. The wooden building is a glorious maze of stairways, corridors and bathing rooms, which makes having a bath feel considerably more adventurous than it probably should.

Arima Onsen near Kobe is another classic. It is one of Japan’s oldest hot spring towns, with more than 1,000 years of history, and is known for two distinctive types of spring water. Kinsen, or ‘gold spring’, is the famous reddish-brown water, while Ginsen, or ‘silver spring’, is clear.

If your idea of relaxation involves first exhausting yourself on a ski slope, Nozawa Onsen in Nagano makes a pretty compelling combination. The village is both a ski resort and historic hot spring town, with public baths dotted around the streets. After a day on the snow, climbing into hot mineral water sounds considerably more appealing than attempting to stretch my hamstrings.

And then there is Ibusuki, where Japan takes the whole getting-hot-and-feeling-better concept in a completely different direction.

Get buried in hot sand at Ibusuki

Ibusuki, at the southern tip of Kagoshima Prefecture on Kyushu, is famous for its sunamushi sand baths, where geothermal heat from the area’s hot springs warms the beach sand. You change into a cotton yukata, lie down and let staff shovel the hot sand over you until you are buried up to your neck. I’m not sure who first looked at a pile of steaming sand and thought, ‘Yes, bury me under that,’ but thousands of people a year concur.

The sand reaches around 50 to 55°C, which sounds slightly unhinged until you realise that this is, in fact, the entire point. You lie there sweating for around 10 to 15 minutes, then emerge looking like something that has been slow-roasted, rinse off the sand and finish with a conventional hot spring bath. The experience is traditionally believed to promote circulation and leave you feeling refreshed.

It is apparently very good for you. I am a little stuck on the part where you voluntarily lie down while someone buries you. Still, if the Japanese have taught us anything, it is that there are apparently many roads to wellness. Some of them just happen to involve a shovel.

If you’re making the trip to Ibusuki, staying overnight turns the whole thing into more of a wellness escape than a quick dip in the sand. Ibusuki Syusuien is a traditional ryokan with its own hot-spring baths, Japanese rooms and kaiseki dining, making it a fitting place to continue the slow-down after your sand bath.

→ Check current rates and availability at Ibusuki Syusuien

Go forest bathing

Forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, sounds like something that should involve a tub. It doesn’t. There are, however, a lot of leaves.

In reality, it means slowing down in a forest and paying attention to what is around you, using all your senses rather than simply walking through it on the way to somewhere else. And it can be surprisingly lovely.

The wind moves through the trees, fallen leaves rustle underfoot and the air smells of damp earth, decaying wood and eucalyptus. Sunlight filters through the canopy. Somewhere in the distance a bird is making itself known. You breathe in, breathe out and, for a little while, the mental noise seems to turn down.

That is really the point of shinrin-yoku. It isn’t a bushwalk, and there is no particular destination. You might walk slowly, sit on a rock, listen to the birds, notice the texture of bark or simply stand among the trees doing very little. The idea is to immerse yourself in the forest rather than conquer it.

The modern practice emerged in Japan in the 1980s, inspired in part by the country’s longstanding reverence for nature. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries promoted shinrin-yoku as a way of encouraging people to spend time in forests, and it has since become a global wellness practice.

Japan is a particularly good place to try it, with forests covering around two-thirds of the country and dedicated forest therapy experiences in places such as Nagano and the Kii Peninsula. In Nagano’s Shinanomachi, forest healing guides lead visitors through the landscape, while the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage routes in Wakayama combine forest, spirituality and walking in one rather impressive package. Research has linked forest bathing with changes in things such as stress, heart rate and blood pressure, and in practice I can believe it, there is something restorative about being in nature.

The nice thing about shinrin-yoku is that there is no achievement component. Nobody is waiting at the end with a medal or asking for your pace. You just wander around looking at trees. Easy.

Try Zen meditation

Zen is not simply a Japanese word for feeling relaxed, despite the number of candles, cushions and spa brochures that might suggest otherwise. Zen Buddhism places considerable emphasis on meditation and awareness, with zazen, or seated meditation, one of the practices visitors can experience at temples around Japan.

One of the easiest places to try it is Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto’s Myoshinji complex, where English-language Zen experiences include meditation, Buddhist philosophy and tea. There are also private Zen experiences and scheduled one-day and three-day retreats.

And this is where Japan gets particularly good at making wellness feel like something other than a wellness product. You’re not necessarily going to a retreat centre decorated in pale timber and beige linen. You are sitting inside a working Buddhist temple, learning about a tradition that has been part of Japanese culture for centuries.

Shunkoin also offers overnight retreats combining meditation with things such as calligraphy, tea ceremony and discussions with the resident priest.

I’m pretty sure I have the Zen temperament required for prolonged periods of sitting still. It’s the physical ability I’m less confident about. As a bona fide fidgeter with creaky knees and hips ageing at a pace that will soon require carbon dating, sitting cross-legged for any length of time could be challenging. But I’d give it one hell of a try.

Sleep in a Buddhist temple

If meditation sounds appealing but you would also like somewhere to actually sleep afterwards, shukubo offers the chance to stay overnight at a Buddhist temple.

Temple stays originally developed to accommodate pilgrims, but today travellers can stay in temple lodgings, join meditation or other Buddhist practices and eat shojin ryori, the traditional vegetarian cuisine associated with Buddhist monks. It is one of those experiences that changes the rhythm of a trip. Instead of rushing out to see another temple before breakfast, you are actually staying in one. Depending on where you go, the experience can include meditation, chanting, temple rituals and simple meals.

There are temple stays across Japan, including on the sacred Dewa Sanzan mountains in Yamagata and along the Shikoku 88 Temple Pilgrimage.

For anyone who finds the idea of a conventional wellness retreat a little too polished, this is probably the other end of the spectrum. You get a temple, a futon and somebody else’s centuries-old spiritual practice to contemplate.

As for me, I have always had a soft spot for  monks. I like the robes, the chanting and the general air of nonchalance. So this is very much up my accommodation alley.

Walk the Kumano Kodo

For some people, who are not me, wellness apparently requires walking for several days through ancient forests. The Kumano Kodo should keep those people happy. Me, I’ll be chasing monks with a green juice in hand.

I jest, the UNESCO-listed pilgrimage routes do genuinely sound incredible. They run through the Kii Peninsula, where pilgrims have been walking between sacred sites for centuries. Today you can tackle anything from short walks of a few hours to multi-day treks, passing through forest, mountain villages, shrines and temples along the way.

The Kumano Kodo has a strong spiritual connection, but you don’t have to be religious to appreciate the experience. There is something inherently restorative about spending several days walking through a landscape where the pace of life is dictated by your feet rather than your phone.

And unlike a wellness retreat, nobody can sell you a treatment while you’re doing it.

Eat like a monk

Wellness in Japan isn’t all about submerging in hot water or sitting still. Food is very much part of the picture too. Yay!

Shojin ryori is the traditional vegetarian cuisine associated with Japanese Buddhist monks. It is built around seasonal vegetables, tofu and other plant-based ingredients, with a strong emphasis on simplicity, balance and avoiding waste. It is generally found in Buddhist temples and temple lodgings rather than ordinary restaurants.

The food is beautifully presented but isn’t really about showing off. The idea is that eating is part of the contemplative experience, with care taken over ingredients, preparation and presentation.

There is also something wonderfully practical about a cuisine in which even the bits of vegetables you might normally throw away can end up in the stock. I’m certianly impressed by a cuisine that refuses to let a perfectly good vegetable end its days in the bin.

Try misogi, a Shinto purification ritual

If meditation involves sitting quietly with your thoughts, misogi takes a rather more energetic approach to clearing the decks.

Misogi is a traditional Shinto purification practice involving water. The practice ccacanvolve standing beneath a waterfall or entering cold water as part of a ritual purification, with the experience rooted in Shinto rather than modern wellness culture.

Which is interesting, given that the rest of the wellness world has spent the past few years getting excited about getting very, very cold. Wim Hof and the whole cold-plunge movement have turned icy water into a wellness trend. Japan, meanwhile, has been getting naked under waterfalls for more than 1,000 years, with references to water purification rituals appearing in Japan’s early texts, including the Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (72 CE). I feel there may be a lesson here somewhere.

There are places where visitors can experience misogi under guidance, including Shirayama-Hime Shrine near Kanazawa, where participants enter cold water as part of a traditional purification ceremony. In Uchiko on Shikoku, you can even stand beneath a 17-metre waterfall as part of a guided misogi experience. It’s not exactly a spa day, but it will certainly clear the mind.

Stay at Amanemu for a little luxury

And then there is Amanemu, which takes everything Japan does naturally and turns it into something spectacularly luxurious.

Set in Ise-Shima National Park on Ago Bay, Amanemu is an onsen resort built around Japan’s long bathing tradition. Its 2,000-square-metre spa has thermal spring facilities, private onsen pavilions, treatment rooms, yoga and fitness spaces and treatments incorporating Japanese practices such as Kampo herbal therapies, acupuncture and shiatsu.

There are also more structured wellness immersions covering mindfulness and stress management, recovery and recuperation, detox and cleansing and other wellbeing goals. Current programmes can combine zazen meditation, tea ceremony, onsen therapy, massage, acupuncture, nutrition and movement.

It is very cool. It is also very much out of my budget, unless anyone feels like shouting me a few nights. I’m always open to offers. Still, for those with the budget, this is Japanese wellness at the luxury end of the scale, with the onsen, landscape and traditions of the region woven into the whole experience rather than bolted onto a luxury hotel.

→ Check current rates and availability at Amanemu

What are the best wellness experiences in Japan?

The best wellness experiences in Japan depend rather heavily on what you think wellness actually means. For a classic Japanese experience, start with an onsen. If nature is your thing, try forest bathing or walk part of the Kumano Kodo. For something more spiritual, look at Zen meditation or a Buddhist temple stay. If you want something genuinely strange, go to Ibusuki and get buried in hot sand.

And if you have the budget for the full luxury experience, Amanemu combines onsen, Japanese traditions, nature and seriously good service in one very beautiful package.

The thing I like about wellness in Japan is that it doesn’t have to look like wellness. It can be a bath, a forest, a pilgrimage, a bowl of vegetables, a temple or, apparently, getting buried up to your neck in hot sand and calling it self-care.

Some of it sounds lovely. Some of it sounds completely bonkers. Sign me up for all of it because bonkers is my bag, baby.

Looking for more real wellness travel inspiration around Asia? Try these…

Wellness Experinces in Cambodia
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Singapore: A view to wellness in Swissotel The Stamford’s Vitality Rooms

 

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