Where to Spend a Day by the Swimming Pool in Phnom Penh
When the Phnom Penh heat settles in for the long afternoon, the city's best answer is a lounger, a cold drink and a stretch of blue water. From a five-dollar beach club on Diamond Island to rooftop infinity pools forty floors up, here is where to get in the water, no hotel booking required.
There is a point in the Phnom Penh afternoon (somewhere between one and three o'clock, when the sun has climbed directly overhead and even the tuk-tuks have gone quiet in the shade) when the only sensible response to the city is to get into water. The heat here is not really an inconvenience to be endured so much as a fact to be planned around, and the residents who made their peace with it long ago worked out the answer years back: find a pool, order something cold, and let the worst of the day pass from a lounger.
The difficulty is access. Phnom Penh is not short of pools (they sit on top of condo towers and behind hotel gates all over the city) but very few of them are yours to use unless you are staying the night or paying a mortgage. What the city does have, and what most visitors never discover, is a healthy supply of pools that welcome day guests: some through a straightforward minimum spend, most through the gentler arrangement by which a swim quietly becomes a long lunch or a round of sundowners.
And the pools come in two quite different registers. There is the ground-level pool you settle into for a whole day (the beach club, the hostel courtyard, the boutique garden) and there is the rooftop pool you visit for an hour of golden light, a cocktail in hand and the city laid out forty floors below. This guide covers both.
Here is where to get in the water in Phnom Penh.
The Beach Club: A Whole Day on Koh Pich
For the fullest version of a pool day (the kind with a proper swim, a cabana, a long lunch and children running loose) the city's most complete answer is DIB Club (Koh Pich Street, Diamond Island). The initials stand for Dara Independence Beach, and the place began life as the urban outpost of the well-known beach club of the same name down on the coast at Sihanoukville: a beach club dropped into the middle of the city, thatched awnings and all. It remains the closest thing Phnom Penh has to a public swimming pool with a personality of its own.
The pool is large and landscaped, with a separate shallow area for children and enough shaded cabanas and loungers around the edge to make a full day of it. Around the water sit football pitches, a golf practice range, ping-pong tables and a bar-and-grill turning out wood-fired pizzas, burgers, salads and cocktails, with a run of European-Asian chef specials. Access to the pool is free with a food-and-drink spend of around five dollars a head (children generally swim free) which makes this comfortably the best-value pool day in the city. It opens at nine in the morning and runs until nine at night, seven days a week, and at weekends the DJ nights that made DIB's reputation still bring a livelier crowd and a string of disco lights to the water's edge.
The Hostel Pool: Budget and Sociable
For a cheaper, louder version of the same idea, the city's best-known backpacker hostel keeps a pool that is as much about the scene around it as the swim. Mad Monkey Phnom Penh (Street 242, Daun Penh) is the party end of the spectrum, a backpacker institution built around an outdoor pool, a bar-restaurant and a daily happy hour that runs to dollar beers and three-dollar cocktails. The kitchen covers gourmet burgers, curries, noodles and Cambodian plates including a respectable fish amok, all pitched at a budget crowd. Nobody comes here for a quiet swim, and that is entirely the point.
The Boutique Pools: A Swim and a Long Lunch
For something quieter and more grown-up (a pool you visit for the lunch as much as the swim) Phnom Penh's boutique hotels are the reliable move, and the price of entry is usually just the meal.
The most generous of them for a day guest is The Birdcage Boutique (Street 262, near Independence Monument), an adults-only, gay-owned boutique built around a large freshwater pool set in a walled tropical garden. It opens the water on a minimum spend of around ten dollars, or an unlimited-drinks package from the same figure, which turns an afternoon by the pool into something closer to a lazy party for the price of a couple of cocktails elsewhere. It is the sort of arrangement that rewards settling in rather than dropping by.
The most characterful is The Pavilion (Street 19, near the Royal Palace), a heritage boutique hotel whose garden pool is one of the loveliest places to lose an afternoon in the old part of the city. Day guests are welcome for a minimum spend of around eight dollars (a lunch and a drink, in other words) which buys a lounger under the frangipani and a swim a few steps from the Royal Palace walls.
A short way north, off Street 19 on the other side of the Royal Palace, El Cafetal Colombiano (Street 19z) has taken over the small pool that made the old Blue Lime a budget favourite for years and given it a Colombian accent. The café now turns out single-origin Colombian coffee, Turkish coffee and Latin-inflected plates, and the pool is still here, yours for the afternoon on a minimum spend of around ten dollars, which a long lunch by the water clears without trying.
Out of Town: The Riverside Resort
For the version of a pool day that feels like leaving the city altogether, The Bale (National Road 6A, on the Mekong north of the centre) is worth the short drive out along the river. A Balinese-styled riverside resort built on feng-shui principles (you arrive across a black-bottomed water court, past stone Buddhas and frangipani) its thirty-metre pool runs the length of the bank, with the boats slipping by on the Mekong beyond. A day pass is fifteen dollars and change per person, fully redeemable against food and drink, so the price is really just lunch by the water with the swim thrown in. It is the calmest pool day on this list, and the furthest from the heat and noise of the centre.
The Rooftop Pools You Can Swim in by Day
When the pool you want comes with a view rather than a garden, Phnom Penh's rooftops deliver, and a handful of them open early enough to make a genuine daytime swim of it.
Highest and most polished is Oasis Skybar (fifteenth floor, Caravan Hotel, Street 228), an infinity-style pool and sunset-facing terrace that runs from half past six in the morning until late, dealing in cocktails, smoothies and light bites with the whole city spread beneath it. On Street 240, Slla Skybar & Restaurant crowns the Aquarius Hotel with a wrap-around infinity pool looking across the Royal Palace to the Tonle Sap, open from half past six in the morning for anything from a first coffee to a sunset swim (the pool comes on a minimum spend of around twelve dollars. Over toward the Royal Palace, Chaktomuk Sky Bar (Okay Boutique Hotel, Street 19) keeps a rooftop pool in a Khmer-styled setting with views across the palace and the riverfront, open from seven in the morning. AKASA Skybar (Le Botum Hotel, Street 244) puts its pool on the eleventh and twelfth floors, angled at the same palace-and-river panorama, and Elephant Sky Bar (Patio Hotel, Street 51) brings the format into the heart of BKK1) a seventh-floor pool bar with an Asian-and-Western kitchen and a view that earns the lift ride.
The Rooftop Pools for a Sundown Dip
Others are built less for laps than for the hour before dark, when the light goes gold and the city softens.
The most dramatic is ED's Cafe (forty-first floor, The Penthouse Residence, Sothearos Boulevard), where an infinity pool sits at the very top of the tower alongside a premium kitchen turning out steak, lobster and sushi, a swim you take once for the altitude and the memory of it. The Luna Sky Bar (Anik Palace Hotel, Street 278) pairs a pool and a jacuzzi with sweeping views and a list of cocktails and homemade pastries, opening at five for the sundown crowd. Back on Sothearos, VEHAA | Restaurant & Bar (59 Sothearos Boulevard) runs a pool terrace above its modern-Khmer tapas kitchen, the pool folded into a rooftop cocktail bar that fills up after dark. And near Bassac Lane, Crown Skybar (LH Residence) tops off the city's best-known bar street with a rooftop pool, a cocktail list and a view worth climbing for.
The Grand Settings: For a Special Occasion
Some pools are less about the swim than the setting, and Phnom Penh's grand old addresses trade on exactly that.
RESTAURANT LE ROYAL is the flagship dining room of Raffles Hotel Le Royal (Street 92, Daun Penh), the city's most storied colonial hotel, and the hotel keeps two pools set in manicured gardens that are a slower, old-world kind of luxury. Access for non-guests generally runs through a spa treatment or a dining spend, and it is worth the small ceremony for an occasion.
A few minutes away, Mealea Restaurant (corner of Sothearos Boulevard and Street 240) sits inside an eighty-year-old French colonial villa in the grounds of the Palace Gate Hotel & Resort, whose large pool is among the more handsome in the centre. The restaurant serves royal Cambodian cuisine at lunch and dinner and an international buffet each morning, a fine-dining anchor to a resort day rather than a casual dip.
And in the colonial compound of the Old August Site (26 Sothearos Boulevard), the French brasserie LA COUPOLE anchors a garden of bars and restaurants that includes a pool among its courtyards, the sort of address you come to for a long lunch and a serious wine list, with a swim as the bonus.
The Bathhouse: Water Without the Swim
Finally, for the days when what you want from water is not a swim at all, Fuji Norea Steam And Sauna (Chbar Ampov) offers the Japanese answer: a tranquil bathhouse of hot and cold plunge pools, steam and sauna rooms and massage, with herbal teas and light bites to follow. It is a different kind of pool day (closer to a reset than a lounge) but on the right afternoon it is exactly the thing.
Tips for a Pool Day
Minimum spend, not a ticket: Only a few pools here charge a flat entry, The Bale's fifteen-dollar day pass among them, and fully redeemable against food and drink at that. Most of the rest (DIB Club, the boutiques, the rooftop bars) ask instead for a food-and-drink minimum, which means you are not really paying to swim so much as agreeing to have lunch or a round of drinks. DIB runs to about five dollars a head, The Pavilion around eight; the rest vary in line with the ambience.
Call ahead: Pool access for non-guests is the policy hotels change most often and advertise least, and at some rooftop venues the pool is reserved for hotel guests even when the bar is open to all. A quick call the morning of will tell you whether you can actually get in the water, and save a wasted tuk-tuk ride. Treat every figure here as a guide, not a guarantee.
Day or dusk: For a real daytime swim, aim at the early openers, DIB and El Cafetal from the morning, Oasis, Slla and Chaktomuk from just after dawn, Mad Monkey all day. The likes of The Luna Sky Bar and VEHAA only come alive from five, and are better thought of as a sundown dip than a full afternoon.
Weekends fill up: DIB Club and the boutique pools are busiest on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, when the families and the weekend crowd arrive together. For a quieter swim and first pick of the loungers, go on a weekday, or get there early.
What to bring: A towel (not always provided, and sometimes charged for), sunscreen, flip-flops, and enough cash for the smaller venues, which do not all take card. The swimsuit goes without saying, and yet.
A pool day in Phnom Penh is not really an indulgence, in a city this hot, it is closer to basic maintenance. What makes it a pleasure rather than a chore is how many registers it comes in: the five-dollar beach club with the kids and the DJ, the frangipani-shaded boutique where the afternoon dissolves over a long lunch, the infinity edge forty floors up that you visit once and remember for years. Pick the one that matches the day you want, clear the minimum, and let the heat become someone else's problem for a few hours. It is one of the more civilised things the city offers, and almost nobody who visits thinks to do it.
Browse every rooftop bar and pool spot in Phnom Penh on BongNham, or climb higher with our guides to the city's hidden rooftop bars and its best bars & nightlife. Planning the whole day around the heat? See what to do with one day in Phnom Penh.