Cambodia with Kids

A raffle is a lottery: you don’t know how things will turn out. A Raffles hotel, on the other hand, is always a winner. So, when SHAMUS SILLAR received an invitation to visit Cambodia’s two Raffles properties and see their new makeovers, he replied before the email ink was dry!

- SHAMUS SILLAR

I’d been to Cambodia a couple of times before, challenging myself with new experiences each time: running a marathon; absorbing sombre stories at the Killing Fields; volunteering at a hospital.

This would be a different challenge: I’d have my family in tow. I was confident my wife Gill would love her first trip to Cambodia, but would our 12- and 10-year-old girls enjoy it too? (It’s not Bali, after all.)

Thanks mostly to Raffles, I needn’t have worried!

# PHNOM PENH
Raffles Hotel Le Royal

We didn’t score the Jacqueline Kennedy Suite at Hotel Le Royal (she stayed here in 1967), but I reckon the former First Lady would have been impressed with our room in any case.

Or should I say rooms: three of them in a huge colonial-style suite, with one wing for adults, one for children and a central living room – plus three big bathrooms, each with an original claw-foot bath. The view was down to the hotel’s two big pools, flanked by giant century-old trees glinting with fairy lights on our evening arrival.

By the way, there’s also a Charles de Gaulle Suite, and another named for Somerset Maugham. My girls didn’t know these famous former guests of Raffles, but as they strolled the black-and-white tiled corridors and climbed the grand wooden staircase, I could tell they sensed the hotel’s illustrious old-world vibe.

Old & New