Setting: Bangkok travel agency:
Tom: "So you're saying for 600 Baht ($18USD) we'll get two seats on an air conditioned bus that will take us to the border, a guide through the Cambodian border, and an air conditioned bus to meet us on the other side and drive us straight to the city center of Siem Reap?"
Travel Agent: "Oh yes, absolutely. It will be easy!"
Tom: "okay..."
Time: Tuesday afternoon
Setting: Cambodian border
After picking up the bus at 6:30am in Bangkok and arriving at the border by 11:30, we were in high spirits about how easy the whole experience had turned out to be. A quick trip through immigration, hop on the next bus and off we would go.
It was not meant to be.
It took us about thirty minutes to cross on foot through the shady no-man's land between the borders of the two countries. No man's land is a seemingly lawless place filled with casinos, vendors hawking any oddity you could imagine and sadly, droves of children clad in rags begging for anything we could spare--money, goods or even leftover bottled water. We were very relieved we managed to make it through immigration with our passport and all our belongings still in hand.
On the other side the situation was truly third-world. It is believed that a certain airline that has a monopoly on flights from Bangkok to Siem Reap is paying the Cambodian government not to finish paving the only road. The result is a 'road' of red earth, which in the rainy season (which it is now) turns to a soupy mud pit. Thanks to a little yellow sticker on our shirts provided to us by our travel agents, we were ushered through the muck to a dingy bus station office and told to wait in plastic orange chairs for the 'government bus' which might come at 2:00 and might come at 4:00, no one really knew.
After an hour or two we gave up asking how much longer it would be until the bus arrived because the answer was always the same "ten minutes, ten minutes, almost here." Hours later the famous bus finally arrived, and we could only laugh. No, the thirty year old jalopy was not the nice air-conditioned bus waiting for us on the other side we'd been promised, but at that point we would have gotten on anything for the chance of getting to Siem Reap in time to find a place to stay for the evening. 
The bus rattled on through the mud for hours with a picturesque view of Cambodian rice paddies as far as the eye could see. After three hours we began to wonder where this bus was actually going, we had not heard or seen anything promising for a few hours and the sun was going down quickly (no street lamps, needless to say...)
Finally we stopped for a late dinner break and we got the chance to ask the driver what was going on-- where would this 'government bus' drop us off? Our fearless leader looked a little shifty as he explained, no this was not a government bus and he wasn't sure where we had gotten that idea, this was his personal bus and would be taking us to his private guesthouse to stay for the night.
At this point it's pitch black out, we have no cell phones, we're on a muddy dirt road in the middle of rural Cambodian on a decrepit bus headed for a destination yet to be determined.
And I guess that's where faith comes in.
We held on to our pillows and sat in the dark and let the hours pass until thankfully, blessed signs of civilization appeared on the horizon. We were, in fact, driving into Siem Reap!!!
Yes, the bus did drop us off at a random guesthouse in a back alley, but thankfully there were at least two dozen tuk tuk drivers just waiting to whisk us off into the night. The one we found, or at least the most persistent, was named "Lucky."
After a long and somewhat taxing day, it was relieving to sit on his little open-air three wheeled vehicle and let Lucky take us to a lovely place with a well-decorated private room and bathroom, a balcony, a free welcome joint Khmer full-body massage, free Internet and bottled water, a pool table and charming cafe...all for $15USD a night :-)
A truly surreal day--- next time, a post on the amazing ancient temples of Angkor Wat and our exfoliating experience at a fish spa in Kuala Lumpur.
No comments:
Post a Comment