So I wanted some adventure... And I got it! I had decided not to take the tourist bus from Bangkok to Siem Reap, the town next to Angkor Wat, but to go it on my own on local buses.
But first I had to get up quite early, at 5.20 am in Ayuthaya. I was on the bus to Bangkok at 6 am. Then arrived in Bangkok at 7.30 am, but the bus to Aranya Prathet would not leave before 9.30 am. Bummer, I could have slept two more hours! At 9.45 still no bus but an announcement that the bus had broken down and a replacement bus was on the way - so we finally left from Bangkok at 10 am. While waiting I had a chat with a nice lady who asked me if I was not scared of going to Cambodia. I said I wasn't. Maybe I should have been...
The bus finally arrived at the Thai border town of Aranya Prathet at about 3pm and I was already quite tired. I had just decided to call it a day and postpone the border crossing adventure and the infamous five-hour bus journey to Siam Reap to the next day, when a friendly elderly lady asked me how I would get to the border. She was living in Laos and was travelling together with her daughter and her grand-son from Adelaide, Australia, who had just a few days before arrived in Bangkok, where she had picked them up. When I said I did not really know she basically "adopted" me and said I should come with her. She arranged for two tuk-tuks and bartered the price down to a realistic level. At the border the first of many Cambodian kids turned up begging and desperately trying to make some money by holding up umbrellas against the sun and walking with you etc.
Being under the protection of this impressive old lady was a true bliss. She not only spoke Laotian Chinese (her mother tongue), Thai, and Cambodian, but also quite good English (she had been living a long time in Australia after fleeing Laos during the Vietnam war). And she had done the journey from Bangkok through Cambodia to Laos for more than 30 years... She knew exactly how to deal with the situation and the people - something I would have had certainly trouble with.
The border crossing was by far the most chaotic I have ever seen! You first have to hire some guy to "help" you with the formalities, but you are always surrounded by dozens of people, some of them more or less official looking who looking at your passport, giving you forms to fill in, telling you to pay some additional fantasy fee etc. First I had to get a Cambodian visa. For that you need a passport photo. I did not have one. (I always used to have some on me in South America, but after never needing them there I had decided not to bother anymore...) No problem, you just pay a standard 100 Baht (2 €) additional fee (read bribe) and none cares about the photograph anymore. The whole procedure took ages and I had no clue what was going on, while the wonderful old lady battled our way through. You could tell she had a very good sense of business here.
Once through the border formalities we had to get to the bus terminal, for that hop we somehow ended up on a bus that actually the "special" tourist bus... At the bus terminal the Laotian lady decided that travelling on the normal bus to Siem Reap was not worth it - the road is notoriously bad and the ramshackle old bus takes five hours for the 150 kilometers... The bus is aptly dubbed "back-breaker" in some guide books. So we decided to charter a taxi. We had more than seven people around us, trying to fit the enormously big and bulky suitcases of the Australian relatives into the boot of the car - a total impossibility as any half-witted idiot would have been able to tell! So it had to be two taxis then. When we finally sat in the cars, the journey turned out a lot more comfortable than it must be on the bus - thanks to the surprisingly good suspension of the vehicles.
The road is a true nightmare. Only in Bolivia have I seen anything similar before. But the driver would just recklessly race along with up to 80 km/h not even trying the slightest to avoid the incredible bumps and potholes in the mainly entirely unsealed track (called a "national highway" in Cambodia). Keeping a distance to any other vehicle is clearly not an option in Cambodia. And human life - neither that of other people on bicycles or motorbikes, nor that of the driver - seems to be of minor importance... I consider it a miracle we finally survived healthy! Especially since after sunset the journey was truly hazardous - huge clouds of dust would obstruct what little of a view was left without daylight. There is no light on the road and many vehicles do not even have lights anymore. In addition to that, practically all vehicles are covered over and over with goods and people. What do you think of a small Toyota pick-up truck with about 25 passengers on top of an enormous amount of all sorts of vegetables? A very common sight indeed on Cambodian roads. And in general, a shocking sight of poverty and rubbish everywhere.
But coming into Siem Reap I was in for an other shock again. Where just a few seconds ago kids in rags had been playing next to the road in the mud, now luxury hotels - one after the other - were lining the street leading into the town. I could not believe my eyes, glitter and glamour everywhere! Almost Las Vegas style. Incredible. The bliss of packaged mass tourism... After driving along what must have been about 20 huge hotel complexes we finally reached the actual town, which is not entirely over the top, but certainly still very different from anything I had seen since the border. All in all a very strange first impression I got from Cambodia.
