All aboard the "Luxury VIP Coach."
Pay no more than the absolute minimun to get to Siem Reap from Bangkok. This is the best you are going to get unless you fly (which is dull).
Calm amidst the storm
En route to Siem Reap
It's workers like these that are most in danger of the landmines.
I knew one of them would collapse! The driver just drove into the field around it!!
“Are we going to get on the big bus now?” We were all asking. The whole group was a little riled because they had conned us out of 300 baht extra each for our visas. We were told that we'd get a bigger bus on the other side.
It was bigger...I'll give them that. But it was the oldest and most clapped out bus I have ever seen. It seated about 16. The door was broken and the windows were plastic - most of which were stuck open. The broken curtain rails were banging against what was left of the windows. There were no curtains. The road from Bangkok to Siem Reap is notorious. Apparently Thai Airways have been bribing Cambodian officials for years not to get it fixed. We had a very amusing six hour journey. Some people were getting annoyed, but I found it all hysterically funny. Luxury bus indeed! Holidays over, back to the travelling then.
The road was so full of massive craters we were bouncing around all over the place. If no-one was suffering with a bad back or whip lash before they got on they were by the end of it. Suspension? Never heard of it. Not on this route anyway. (We found out later that they will not allow their decent coaches to do that road because it is so bad). We kept on having to go over rotten wooden slack bridges. 'I'm sure these are going to collapse!' 'Don't be silly' replied Tim. Sure enough we arrived at one which had indeed collapsed. No worry at all for the driver. He just drove the bus into the field and around it. So much for not straying off the official path!
It got dryer and dryer and so dusty and then dustier. The scenery and the good spirit on the bus made the journey go quite quickly though. We couldn't stop laughing about the poor sods who had paid an extra 200 baht for a VIP service. Twats. There are warnings all over the guide books. Luckily, they saw the funny side of it too.
As soon as we crossed the border into Cambodia and cleared the first town, everywhere looked like we were in ‘Apocalypse Now’. It's the trees that do it. I had just read a book called 'First They Killed my Father' about a little girl who survived the Pol Pot massacres. It was exactly as she described it. Everything covered in red dust (including all of us), tumble down shacks on stilts and those fantastic trees that you always see in Vietnam war movies. Lots of very thin cows and lots, and lots, and lots of huge holes. After six hours of the bumpiest road ever we were glad to reach Siem Reap to a clean bed and a warm shower.
Travellers yet to visit Siem Reap take note: Part of the bus scam is that the company makes sure it arrives after dark and then takes you to his mate’s guest house. Well, in our case ‘mate’s guest house’ was actually really nice. We got a huge, really clean room for $3 each with a private bathroom and hot water. The guide books will also tell you that the hotels they use are out of the way. Ours was about two minutes walk to the rest of the backpacker hotels. I wasn’t about to complain.
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