We’d bargained hard to get a good deal on the transport (or so we thought) into Cambodia. So our large group clambered into our first mini van of the day at 9am where we were driven a short distance to the local farmer’s bank to exchange our kip into dollars and pay for the journey. The bank looked like it was something from the turn of the 20th Century – all work was still meticulously logged into large legers with receipts signed in triplicate, and everything was calculated and handwritten by the few administrators, one of which had such a streaming cold that the face mask she was wearing was damp where she had been continually sneezing into it – nice… The whole bank appeared to operate out of 2 rooms – an office for the male manager, flanked by a framed mugshot parade of his senior executives, and the main room where the female administrators worked with the customers. Every transaction had to be signed off by the manager, so it was a slow process, especially when those in our group who needed to withdraw money using their cards found that plastic-based banking technology had not yet reached this venerable institution so instead they had to visit the bank of Chris, who boasted a substantial fund of his native currency for loan at favourable rates!
It was actually quite an interesting experience seeing the bank operate at first, watching the locals coming and going with various dirty bundles of kip flowing over the counters but two hours later we’d definitely had enough!
Once we had got rid of the soon to be worthless Kip we headed to the riverbank and boarded a battered pontoon which was noisily and painfully pushed by a little tugboat belching out an acrid black smoke. A few bumpy dirt lanes later we stopped at a café a few miles closer to the border. The driver asked us all to get out and get some lunch. We had to unload our backpacks as someone else would be along to pick us up soon.As it was lunchtime we grabbed a quick plate of rice and then waited for our next lift to arrive. We waited. We continued to wait. Finally about an hour and a half later someone arrived to pick us up. It was after 1pm by now and we had still failed to travel more than 10 miles. Our driver picked us up – we bundled in eager to get to the border, which wasn’t too far. Our driver drove very very slowly, and proceeded to tell us that they could take us all the way to Siem Reap for an extra $5 each rather than the agreed overnight stop off. That is when the alarm bells started to ring. We thanked the driver and said that we would like the stop off, he continually advised against it. We got to the border and were told yet another mini van would be waiting on the other side for us. So we got out paid the $2 leaving fee (or bribe) to the Laos officials to stamp us out of Laos and then walked through no mans land to the Cambodian border hut. With no problems we were stamped into Cambodia and jumped into the next mini van.
This driver then tried to tell us that it would be much better to pay the $5 and get to Siem Reap in one night, he said we could be in Siem Reap by 7pm, then he added that the ‘other’ mini van had broken down and he couldn’t guarantee us a lift to Siem Reap the next day as agreed – instead he said it would be 2 or 3 days before they could get us to our destination. It was quite obvious that they never planned us to do a stop and thought we would jump at the option to be taken straight to Siem Reap – so they were quite taken aback when we weren’t so keen. However, we finally decided as a group that now we were in the mini bus we would go straight to Siem Reap. I for one now did not trust these people and knew that if we had been dropped off for the night we would never see them again – so I figured it would be best just to get there and pay the guy his $5, we had done well not to be ripped off before hand. We told the driver and his assistant that we would pay the extra but not until we got to Siem Reap as the plans were being constantly changed and we wanted to ensure that we actually got to where they were promising us! That was when the drivers assistant well and truly threw his toys out of the pram, and after having a tantrum followed by a wonderful impression of a 3 year old sulking we pulled up at what turned out to be the drivers house! (During the journey we must have made 5 or 6 stops in a 3 hour period for the driver to empty his bladder at the side of the road!) After the driver had faffed around in his house for maybe ¾ of an hour we set off again, where we stopped at a guesthouse and met several more very disgruntled travellers who had been promised a lift to Siem Reap, had been dropped off there to be told they would be picked up soon and had been waiting over 5 hours!
They climbed into the mini van – which was now completely full and a Cambodian boy who we found out from the driver was the bosses son was sitting / crouching in the foot well of the sliding door. A few more hours and we stopped again – it was now 7pm and the sulky man had left us and we stopped at a café where we were told that we were waiting for a couple more people to join us and then we would continue. We naturally assumed that must have meant that the other travellers were leaving us at this point – we were wrong!
We got taken round the corner after another hour of waiting and moved into a proper rusty old mini van, and then it was filled to capacity and then filled some more! By the end of it the mini van had 5 more people in it than it was designed to have and we were very cosy indeed!! Although uncomfortable we all put up with it as by this point we just wanted to get to our final destination. We set off and very soon the road turned from tarmac to dirt and then it felt like we were off-roading, the potholes in the road were very deep and made up more of the road than the dirt! It was fun to start with – but an hour later we were more than ready to get off the road. At about midnight (we started our journey 15 hours ago now) we hit normal road again and could see houses at the sides of the road again.
What was interesting was there were large sheets of polythene that had been strung up which formed nets. Above this were big blue UV lights. The thing that was strange was there wasn’t one or 2 there were literally hundreds lining the roads, in the fields, outside people’s houses – it looked like we were on a film set for some strange sci – fi film. We managed to find out from the driver that it was cricket season (as in the bugs rather than the sport!) and these sheets were used to catch them. Apparently the Cambodians loved to eat them, and the ones outside houses were a personal stash for the owners. We stopped to look at them.Another line that we had been strung was that accommodation had been organised for us when we finally got to Siem Reap – although slightly concerned about the condition of this accommodation we were just pleased to know we had somewhere when we got to the other end. However, yet again this plan turned out not to be true. When at the outskirts of the city we were told that they did not have anywhere for us to stay! We were then fed a load of rubbish of how they couldn’t drive into the city – but they would drop us off with some tuk tuk drivers who would take us to a place that was open. So at 3am we wearily got out of the mini van and into a tuk tuk and were whisked off to a guesthouse – fearing the worst about the standard of the place we were about to be taken. Thankfully it actually turned out to be a nice new place with reasonable prices too, so we all decided to stay. It was actually quite funny when we were checking in at what was now 4am they were busy trying to sell us trips to Angkor Wat the next day. We were all so tired by now we just ignored them, but it wasn’t the best introduction to Cambodia! Our 7ish hour journey had turned out to end up taking over 19 hours to complete….. I really hoped there wouldn’t be many more journeys like that to come.
Manchester
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