Thailand - Border Run

I know I haven’t been keeping up with the travel journal well but I’m going to try to get back to them in the coming days. This is actually the last part I have written down for Thailand so after this I’ll just have to do it from memory, which will certainly be faster if somewhat less complete. I also only have a limited amount of pictures for the next few days due to some camera problems. But with all that said here’s back to the journal of my trip to Thailand.

When I woke up the next morning it was raining so hard I thought someone had turned on the shower. It continued for about half an hour than it just stopped and the rest of the day was bright and clear. Me, Ken, and Peter who had extended his trip by a couple of days, decided to head on up to Cambodia and Angkor Watt. We knew that the border closed at 8pm and we thought we had plenty of time, but we were wrong. We checked it out of the hotel by 8:45am, we would have left a day earlier but I’ve always been and still am pretty slow it getting going in the morning. We got a truck from the hotel to the boat and while we almost ran over one motto driver who fell on the slick roads we made it there in one piece. Immediately there were people trying to sell us dubious tickets to lots of far flung destinations but always disliking touts we just decided to do it ourselves.

The ferryboat took us back across to the mainland which while not a big trip, I could see the land even before we left, took a long time on the extremely slow boat. The boat chugged along but I was particularly worried as if the boat sank I think I could’ve swam to shore. We finally made it to the shore and we took another truck to an actual town a few km away. From there we got a buss to another city a few hours north that would hopefully have a bus to the border. That bus left around twelve but we still thought we were making OK time. All the buses seemed nice and they had the air conditioning which was crucial in the intense heat. My Kindle was great for all this as not only did I have books at a buttons press but I could read one for an hour or two and then easily switch to another block for a while.

When we got to the next town it was 1:30 but unfortunately there were no busses going to the border until the evening, and since it was about five hours away that would be too late. There was also a bus going to get another city near to the border but it didn’t leave until three. This didn’t really seem like it would get us there in time but we didn’t have many choices. We sat and waited for the bus to fill and for it to be three. The earlier buses had been half filled but this one was filled over capacity with people standing in the aisles. I had a seat but unfortunately it was wet from the air conditioning dripping onto it. Peter had the most interesting seat on the buss next to a couple of monks who in broken English told him they had been at some political rally and were big fans of the old prime minister Thaksin who had been deposed in a military coup with the tacit backing from the King the last time I was in Thailand. He was always much more popular with the poor people outside Bangkok. (Ed. People like these monks are on the so called “red shirt” side of the latest protests in Thailand you may have read about)

By the time we got to the next town we had finally made good time it was only about six. Another bus was also leaving immediately for the border which we thought might just get us there in time. And we arrived at the border town, for most over land borders I’ve seen there tends to be one town on each side of the border sprung up from the traffic in between, we still had to get a few km to the actual border. We grabbed a tuk-tuk barely stopping to negotiate and headed to the border. For all I saw that I border town the whole placing seems to be built on scams. There were about six fake Cambodian consulates and twice as many places promising to help with visas, which are extremely easy. A number of these places looked really officials and if not for the guidebooks warnings it would have been easy to fall for one. Our tuk-tuk driver tried to pull into one but after all of us yelling that we were just wanted to go to the border he finally took us there. By the time we got the actual border was a little past 730. Peter still needed a visa but that was easily resolved for the same price we paid in Bangkok. So at least if they were ripping of us off in Bangkok it was no worse than the rip off at the border.

I’ve seen overland borders before but I’ve never seen one that looked this pours. People seemed to just be walking back and forth at their leisure. In fact it seemed only the westerners even had to bother with anything like a passport or a visa. Once past the Thai side, which was infinitely more organized than the Cambodian side, we came not to the Cambodian border but to a series of casinos. It seems that gambling being illegal in Thailand has been put so close to the border that you can exit Thailand spend days at a casino and then reenter without ever going through the Cambodian border. In fact it’s sort of confusing which way you have to walk not to accidentally go into a casino. The Cambodian border on the other hand looked incredibly run down compared to the Thai one and again it was easy to almost miss the place where they looked at your visa.

This process took a while even though at only a few minutes to the closing there weren’t a lot of people going through. Once on the other side I was simply floored. All that was around was a big circle, the inside of which looked like it had the pedestal of a statue with no statue, and tons of trash everywhere. The only people around were an virtual army of people offering rides to Siam Riep, the town whose main, and possibly only, claim to fame is holding Angkor Watt nearby. The book basically said that there was no choice but to go with one of these guys since the police enforced an illegal monopoly and basically set the prices. We negotiated with about 15 people, which made me incredibly nervous in this strange and rundown looking place after dark. It just gave off a feel as if you had wandered into the wrong part of an American city after dark.

Unlike a lot of people selling stuff these guys were somewhat willing to negotiate against each other since I think they were probably going home anyway and we were basically the last tourist through the border. I don’t remember exactly what we paid but it was about what the book said it would be despite it being a huge rip off. We drove out of town on what literally seemed to be the only road for the two or three hour ride to Siam Riep. At one point we had to stop for gas which seemed not to be gasoline at all but what I think was propane pumped into a tank in the trunk, which probably insured that in a rear end collision we would all go up in a huge fireball. During that time I didn’t really want to get out of the car since I was worried we’d never see our bags again.

We finally rolled into Siam Riep which seems to be nothing more than hotels and restaurants in the whole town. Some of the hotels were run down; some were incredibly showy things for rich foreigners. We picked on that was nice enough for the two nights we were spending there. We went out to get some food at first worried about changing money until we discovered that the dollar is basically the official currency of Cambodia. They have their own money but they really just use it to make change from dollars since they don’t have US coins. Even the ATM’s game US dollars, there was in fact no other choice, and Ken even found an ATM that would take his Chinese card and give him dollars, quite a find.