Cabs in Cabodia

On Thursday morning, we woke up on our overnight train to a 2-hour delay.  Having experienced this same phenomenon of somehow losing time in the night on our last train, we accepted this in stride and made the most of our last hours by catching up on our reading and sleeping.  Interestingly, the girls and woman in the next set of bunks immediately started complaining.  The car had gotten too hot in the middle of the night (nobody in our group had noticed), the beds were too hard (they were beds! We were horizontal! It was glorious), the train was delayed (we were paying $1/hour to travel in Thailand - such is life).  After traveling with such a flexible, upbeat crowd, it was amazing to me how quickly people forgot their privilege and focused on the negative.  The even more worrisome thing?  Seeing a train on the adjacent tracks half-derailed close to Bangkok.  I felt even more lucky to have arrived safely on both of my trips.  These trains and routes are quite old, but I had never heard of them being unsafe.

Once in Bangkok, we were back on our home turf and navigated the city with ease, emerging at the Mo Chit station fresh from a burst of AC on the MRT (subway).  But the promised bus station was nowhere to be found.  My guide (this website: http://www.travelfish.org/feature/71).  But not really.  I had just assumed that the Mo Chit subway and bus stations would be the same place.  And one should never assume.  But we met a nice Thai couple who wrote out our destination in Thai and said that the taxi ride should cost about 50 Baht (1.50 USD). It worked like a charm, and minutes later we had escaped Bangkok morning commuter traffic and were standing in a giant bus station.  We found the desk selling tickets and got seats on the 11:30 bus.  For about 10 USD, we got "first class" seats on a bus to the border market (on the Cambodian border).  The bus would have air conditioning and we even got a welcome package of a little custard-filled cake and a bottle of water.  Thailand certainly knows how to make us feel like VIPs.  We were late, but not deterred.  Plus, having about an hour before our bus allowed us to relax, stretch our legs, and get food.  While we had planned well for the first overnight train, we had indulged a bit too much on this latest journey and had subsisted on sugar-covered peanuts, ramatans, and pumpkin chips.  It was time for something hearty, warm, and nutritious.  We found some made-to-order soup (a meal doused in boiling water? Perfect! Take that, Thai germs!) and I enjoyed identifying the vegetables using my new, cooking class knowledge.

 Also offered: a complete Asian reconstruction of the hamburger

Finally, we boarded our bus.  While we technically had assigned seats, we quickly realized that such details were ignored and we settled in wherever we pleased.  It was an interesting crowd: families that had grandparents and young children, a dressed-up middle-aged Thai couple, a water sports instructor from Bali, an American couple who seemed very confused, a monk who sat in the back and looked utterly serene, and a couple of talkative older women who settled in the Hello Kitty-covered seats up front.  And off we went.  Time was kept by the bright yellow clock with a portrait of the royal couple as the background.  We had frequent stops, which I couldn't identify as pick-up sights or merely rest stops, but it allowed us to get ice cream or use a less terrifying bathroom.  Lurching squat toilets on a bad road are no joke.

As I mentioned to my travel companions earlier on the trip, I view solitude as a chance for defragmentation.  Things are, at first, scattered and many different colors.  Beautiful chaos.  But taking time to organize those pieces and make connections, to bring all the fragments to their proper place, is necessary from time to time.  This was a bus ride of defragmentation for all of us.  We also continued reading our various sources on Angkor Wat, sharing fun facts and connecting what we learned to what we had already seen in Thailand.  And when both of those sources of entertainment were exhausted, I enjoyed the southern Thai countryside, dotted with rice paddies, flooded roads, lakes, beautiful endless green fields, spindly trees, and stretches of flat with mountains so far in the distance they looked like shadows.  I have really loved going overland from place to place on this trip.  It is somehow far less exhausting than an airport for me, and I feel like I get to know a country much better this way.

When at last we reached the border, we were let off the bus in front of a building and shepherded inside by men who came to the bus to meet us.  They sat us down at long tables with plastic chairs and gave us immigration form to fill out.  They took our passports to a nearby table and asked for money for the visa (it's not worth getting a Cambodian visa ahead of time).  But they quoted a price twice as high as it should have been, and they weren't in uniform, and it was all very strange.  But the bus people had dropped us here and watched us go.  Something wasn't right.  I protested, citing the online research I had done.  I knew the prices.  We grabbed our passports and documents and left.  Our Balinese bus mate tailed us.  He was even more confused, but mostly because he had done no research and was going wherever the wind took him.  He didn't even know where he was going in Cambodia.  He had never heard of Siem Reap or Angkor Wat.

Once out of the building, we saw that the building was labelled on this side, "Consulate of Cabodia".  

We exchanged a look - what was this country we were entering?  A man in a pink shirt approached, saying the visa should only cost $20 (correct) and that he would help us.  No thank you, scammer.  We've got this.  But he persisted, and in the end he was an actual government employee (so said his ID badge, which identified him as Sin Borann).  We got through Thai customs and Cambodian immigration (both easy) and there we were.  

The man in pink offered us a taxi at the going rate ($48) straight from here instead of having us take the free government shuttle to the transfer station and get the taxi there.  We found out that it was his brother and, fresh from being scammed, backed out.  We got to the transfer center and about 8 plain-clothes men were as vocal as the one official about buying our ticket.  They took our money and gave us our ticket (indeed, $48), then tried to make us change one bill with a tiny rip.  We refused, afraid they had switched it for some counterfeit given the long lag between money exchange and protest.  We prevailed and got our change.  But then there were no taxis at the station.  They had to call one.  Pink shirt man stood beside us and whined that we didn't trust him.  But soon we were on our way.

The ride was pleasant and quick (our taxi driver, Chang, was a bit of a lead foot), but as we entered Siem Reap the skies opened up and we appreciated that we were here for the rainy season.  We have has such good weather for the whole trip that it's easy to forget.  

Our taxi driver pulled over to the side of the road, our hostel nowhere in sight.  He rolled down our window and a tuk tuk driver stuck in his head.  He told us we and to take his tuk tuk - no extra charge - to the hostel.  Now, four people is crowded in a tuk tuk.  Four people plus luggage in pouring rain? No thank you.  It turned out that it was our driver's brother (family love is very big here) and that our problems were twofold: (1) taxis aren't allowed within city borders for fear of a fine, and (2) our driver didn't know where our hostel was.  We convinced our driver to, under cover of rain, follow his brother's tuk tuk to our hostel.  At last we arrived.  But our night was not yet over.  It turned out that we has made our reservation for only three night instead of four, and our reservation started the next day.  Luckily (thank you, low season!) they could squeeze us in for an extra night in different rooms.  

We celebrated with breakfast for dinner.  As we ate, a Brazilian couple came in, soaking wet and exhausted.  They has taken the mini bus and has been dropped off in the rain in the middle of nowhere, by a group of tuk tuk drivers in cahoots with the bus.  They were charged as much for the short tuk tuk ride as for the bus ride to the city and finally, a long while later, arrived at the hotel.  Despite all we had been through, we were again grateful for how well things have worked out.  What I this country? Well, we were about to spend three days finding out.

Spotted: Bathroom hoses.  Since the Cambodians don't really seem to believe in toilet paper (at least not outside of hotels), they instead always have hoses available in the bathrooms for people to use when cleaning themselves up after using the facilities.  

A testimonial from Nicolas: "Once you've got it down, there's nothing better.  You don't have to worry whether you're using too much paper, and there's no chafe!"