Phnom Penh Walking Tours, Straight Up
A walking tour company will sell one “best of Phnom Penh” route that strings everything together. In practice, the city splits cleanly into three separate walks, and cramming all of them into one long slog means finishing all three badly instead of one properly.
Start with the Sisowath Quay riverfront promenade, 2.5 km along the Tonlé Sap from the Night Market past the Royal Palace to the Chaktomuk Theatre. It’s flat, fully paved, and the only one of the three you can genuinely do at any time of day, though late afternoon adds vendors, monks crossing between errands, and outrigger longboats working the water.
The French Colonial Quarter is a different walk entirely, and treating it as an extension of the riverside route is how people end up exhausted halfway through. Start at Place de la Poste, the 1890 post office facing the old Police Commissariat, then head under tree cover to Raffles Hotel Le Royal, past the French Embassy gates, finishing with the shaded climb up Wat Phnom. Do this one in the morning, since the streets between stops offer little shade, and there is no riverside breeze to cut the heat once you leave Sisowath Quay behind.
Toul Tom Poung (Russian Market) and its surrounding side streets, home to genuine street murals, zero-waste boutiques, fair-trade workshops, and small bakeries, sit far enough from downtown that walking there from the riverside isn’t realistic. Treat it as its own outing, arriving by tuk-tuk rather than trying to connect it on foot to either of the other two walks, and budget an hour just for the side streets once you are there, since the market stalls alone will eat up more time than you expect.
Whichever walk you pick, keep your phone off the street side and out of your hand near the curb. Drive-by bag and phone snatching from passing motorbikes is Phnom Penh’s most common tourist crime, and it happens fast enough that casual phone use near traffic is the real risk, not pickpocketing in a crowd. Comfortable, broken-in shoes matter more here than in most cities too, since uneven pavement and parked motorbikes turn every route into an obstacle course rather than a smooth stroll.
Verdict: do the riverfront and the French Quarter as two separate mornings rather than one combined day, and treat Russian Market’s side streets as a standalone afternoon by tuk-tuk rather than a rushed final stop tacked onto either walk. For what’s actually inside the Royal Palace once you reach it, see the sightseeing guide .