Sat 21 Mar - Bangkok

Back to the amazing hustle and bustle of big Bangkok! Even at 5am the city is a hive of activity and commerce – the bus station was busy with travellers arriving and departing, taxi and tuk-tuk drivers hassling and haggling, and bleary-eyed street vendors already flogging and selling their rip-offs.

Although tired, we managed find and catch a bus to Banglamphu, walk through Thanon Khao San and Soi Rambutri, have a just-average breakfast and find some accommodation nearby. The Bella Bella Guesthouse was only average in standard but that doesn’t surprise as I’m now taking the sleeping advice of Lonely Planet with a grain of salt. From now on I’ll be relying instead on HostelWorld.com, which has found us the two best digs of our trip (the Equator Hostel in KL and the Parami Guesthouse in Chiang Mai). The website features ratings and comments from a large number of travellers, as opposed to the fat little guide book which is based on one person’s opinion, so in hindsight its greater reliability should be expected.

The traffic in Bangkok has to be seen to be believed. I can’t recall seeing roads as congested as these. Heading from Banglamphu to Siam Square on local bus number 3 seemed easy enough until the midday traffic reduced our progress to around a few hundred metres in half an hour. Hence, the small fare was written off and haste made to the river taxis. My advice to anyone heading to this city is to not rely on the roads in the major areas and to use the other options instead, such as the rivers and trains.

I’ve resigned myself to carrying a third bag for the remainder of our travels as today’s regular visit to a G2000 store finally reaped a new suit. I parted with around AUD 200 each for 3 suits in Hong Kong in July 2007 and today the sum of AUD 160 was added to the accumulating credit card debt. With a heap of stores in Singapore it might not be the last.


Sun 22 Mar – Bangkok, Thailand to Siem Reap, Cambodia

Sitting at the Poipet International Terminal pounding the keyboard, dominating my thoughts is that this is the worst first impression of a country I’ve experienced. Corruption and dishonesty are the words that come to mind, and unfortunately I’m talking about the Cambodian officialdom. I’ll have to reserve opinion on the real Cambodians, as suggested by the fat little guide book, for a few days.

The alarm was set for 4:30am, courtesy of an early morning bus ride from Bangkok to Aranya Prathet, on the Thai side of the border. By 10am we had arrived at the crossing town. The next four hours have been as unfunny as diarrhoea in a spacesuit.

Our tuk tuk driver, operating for a generous but unchallenged 80 Baht fare, was instructed to take us to the border, but took us to a tourist agency. Here we were informed that they were the issuing authority for Cambodian Visas for 30 USD. Knowing that the official rate was 20 USD we did not agree and insisted that we were taken to the border. In hindsight, perhaps we should have deducted some, maybe half, of our greedy driver’s fee. Anyway, the I’m bringing the Siam Frontier Tour and Travel Ltd companies’s name up in disgrace and with a warning that it is to be avoided by all tourists.

Leaving Thailand was not a problem, which is consistent with the overall good tourist infrastructure in place there. Entering Cambodia was a pain though. Tourist visas are to be purchased at the border entrance for US 20, a fact clearly pointed out on the sign above the service window. However, when attempting to make the purchase, each tourist is shown a hand-written sign stating that unless 1000 Baht (over 40 AUD) is paid the visa will take a day. Payment will ensure that the visa is magically produced within a couple of minutes. After I made my intentions clear that I knew what the price was and was not going to pay any additional fees, the window was promptly shut.

If I had my time over again, here would be where I stood my ground further and not moved from the window, ensuring that no visas would be processed until mine was completed at the official rate. However, we did cave in somewhat and paid 100 Baht (4 AUD) as the bribe. My thoughts now are that if all tourists were to stand their ground and not pay any bribe whatsoever, this problem would gradually go away.

The next area we were herded into was the dilapidated immigrations office. There is no fee payable here but that did not stop some of the tourists appearing to hand over a small amount of cash for having their passport stamped. I’m happy to say that both of went through this procedure without paying a single cent. When others has been paying their bribe, we both simply took our passports back and walked out.

The fun didn’t stop there. We were met by a young man who insisted that we board a free tourist bus which would transfer us to the “Poipet International Terminal”, an empty large concrete building around 5 minutes away from the border and in the middle of nowhere. Not having any real good guidance for other alternatives (another hole in the fat little guidebook’s advice) we agreed.

(Ironically, a few days later I’ve found some guidance printed from the web by Libe that provided good instructions on how to get a share taxi in Poipet to Siem Reap for about USD 25).

There are two onward travel options from the Terminal – bus or share taxi. The bus costs USD 10 but leaves when full. After lengthy deliberations and considerations we elected for the bus, despite the fact that we were told it was to leave two hours later. The touts, including our supposedly genuine guide, push travellers towards the taxis, whose price is negotiable but generally is around a hugely inflated USD 60. Again, it is only because tourists submit themselves to such prices regularly that this poor market exists, and I’m glad we stood our ground for the bus, even if the bastards did continue the dirty tactics (e.g. bus delays) to try to sell the taxi option. The bus itself was actually quite good and certainly more comfortable than a cramped share taxi would’ve been.

I’ll finish my rant about the Cambodian tourist infrastructure there but am happy to provide advice on how to circumnavigate all of these pitfalls to anyone else using the road from Bangkok to Cambodia.

There is a clear distinction between this country that is new to us and the Thailand that we were in for two weeks. Comparatively, the Cambodian landscape we saw was flat, dry and underdeveloped. Categorising the two, Thailand may possibly be classified as a second-world country and Cambodia into the third.

We both really enjoyed Thailand, so much so that of the three countries we’ve been to so far it’s probably the one to which I would return to first. The country is as cheap or expensive as you make it, although our loose spending habits mean that we’ve spent more cash than we thought we might have. It is a comfortable place to tour around and well recommended to anyone thinking of making the trip here.

We finally arrived at the Garden View guesthouse around 6pm, after around thirteen hours of being in transit. Our initial thoughts of the ‘normal’ Cambodia (excluding aforementioned bureaucracies) is that it seems expensive – except maybe for alcohol. US 60c for a pot of beer, $13 for a 750ml bottle of Baileys sounds pretty good to me. Food and transport, two of the other main costs, appear likely to accumulate quietly but significantly. The fact that the country’s most used currency is the US Dollar (the official currency is the Riel) certainly contributes this. A lot of items will be cost a minimum of 1 USD, yet if the Riel was used (which currently trades at around 4,200 Riel for 1 USD) fractions of this amount are likely to be involved instead.