Loco

So, it’s time for another installment from Lara and Tom. This week, they have some useful advice for us regarding possible entry and exit strategies for crossing Cambodia’s borders. Entry into Cambodia, it seems, includes an official guide who accompanies you to safety…

Aranya Prathet, Thailand, to Poipet, Cambodia
We crossed the border into Cambodia at Aranya Prathet, one of Thailand’s five land border crossings. It was a very confusing process with little information and scams a plenty. Have your wits about you and don’t trust anyone.

Having been warned against taking the ‘direct’ bus from Thailand to Siem Reap we made our own way to Aranya Prathet. It feels like the end of the road with little in the way of accommodation and the dredges at the bottom of the culinary barrel (including frog, lizard and bush meat).

The border is open from 7.30am to 5pm and you can buy your visa at the border. The tuk tuk journey from town (6km) should cost no more than 50 Bhat, and make sure your driver takes you to the border and not to the ‘Cambodian Consulate’. The Cambodian Consulate is a scam. The sign and building certainly look legitimate and they do sell Cambodian visas, but after one too many “sure brother’s” we got suspicious. Only it was too late; as we had handed over $30 for a visa that we later learnt should cost only $20. The best place to buy your Cambodian visa, if you haven’t got one in advance, is from the visa booth once you have gone through Thai immigration and customs. Cambodian immigration and customs are then a straightforward stamp and enter.

Poipet is an unnerving and unwelcoming entrance to a country. After the relative ease, cleanliness and smiles of Thailand, Cambodia throws dust, ragged children and deformed adults at you. Women pull carts through a cesspool of a road piled high with rubbish and mud. Going through the Angkor towers gate into Cambodia felt like walking through a portal in to another world.

Moving on from Poipet to Siem Reap or anywhere in Cambodia is a chore. The Cambodian authorities claim to have made it easier to avoid scams by providing their own irritating touts and escorts across the border. Whether you like it or not, they’ll accompany you from Aranya Prathet to Poipet and put you on a free bus to the tourist bus terminal (about 200m), where you pay corresponding tourist prices.
It is a slow roller coaster ride on red mud, about as bumpy as the roads in northern Laos, but it is also a fascinating introduction to Cambodia. Dazzling fields of rice stretch as far as the eye can see with water buffalo wallowing, children playing and men fishing with nets all up to their waists in water. Given the country’s history it feels tropically eerie. These feelings were offset by the surreal as a man on motorbike went by with two rigor-mortised pigs, trotters pointing towards the heavens, strapped on the back.

The last part of the trip is finding your guesthouse in Siem Reap. On the city outskirts the taxi driver passes you over to a tuk tuk for the final leg of the journey. Make sure you have a hostel reservation, or pretend you have one, and insist on being taken there and not to the one where the driver receives commission. The tuk tuk ride is included in the taxi fare. Another irritating ‘official’ rides with you trying to sell tours of the temples. Ignore him too. Once settled Siem Reap is definitely worth the hassle, and the journey there is an unforgettable and unique part of the Cambodian adventure.

Bavet, Cambodia, to Moc Bai, Vietnam
Leaving Cambodia is a doddle in comparison to entry. The road from Phnom Penh to Vietnam is good and there are direct buses from Phnom Penh to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) that take six hours ($12).

There is little more to say about the crossing. It was easy. You give your passport to the bus staff and they get the exit stamp for Cambodia while you are eating lunch and admiring the bling of Bavet‘s casinos. You then get off the bus to go through Vietnamese immigration and your bags are scanned at customs. Back on the bus and you’re in Vietnam….

You can read past blog entries here.

We can’t remember exactly how it started. We can’t even recall when. It was probably on another holiday and over another pint when…I proposed the idea for our next trip: “how about going on a wee jaunt around the world…” Lara screwed up her face “…without flying?”. Her eyes lit up

Having traveled across Europe, through Japan, China, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, we join Lara and Tom as they take their first steps in Vietnam. They have traveled 17,063 miles, on 46 trains, 10 buses, 6 boats and 11 cars. (You can read previous blog entries here) Their journey into Vietnam was a doddle compared with what they faced departing Thailand for Cambodia, and so, while we wait for news of their slow travel adventures from the rice paddies and floating markets of Vietnam, we back-track a little to the Temples of Angkor, early sunrises, monsoon rain, and the trials-and-tribulations of slow-travel Cambodia style.

Crossing the border from Thailand into Cambodia it soon becomes apparent we’re in a different country. Not everything changes of course: the tropical heat is still intense; the writing just as squiggly; the large paintings along the roadsides of their monarchs with medals similarly blinged-up.

The friendly demeanor, the enticing smiles may continue, but we soon find out that these two countries share more differences than just the ongoing border dispute, (a nasty little row which has recently spilled over into out-and-out, albeit small-scale, fighting.) This current conflict is most certainly not good for business, at least in Cambodia’s tourist epicenter, Siem Reap, much-needed tourist dollars are down as visitors are scared off, leaving guesthouse owners and tuk tuk drivers like our own, the curiously-named Mr Pea, competing with too many others for too little business. Unlike Thailand, this is a country where crushing poverty is endemic and the recent past is very dark indeed. This starts to become apparent the moment we cross the border: hassle from hawkers increases; begging becomes commonplace.

Any westerner is a potential meal ticket and the locals go to great lengths to prise the much-valued dollar out of your willing hands (in Cambodia, the mighty Greenback is King; the local Rial currency used only as small change). At times it becomes just plain uncomfortable. Riddled with guilt from a day spent batting away beggars in rags and scrawny waifs we sat down for dinner at a café on the street. Within minutes they had zeroed in on us, trying to flog us their pitiful wares, surveying you with hungry eyes and making each mouthful feel unjustified. The tuk tuk drivers are incorrigible, following you into your guesthouse in a bid to secure the next day’s business: “where to tomorrow sir? Killing fields? Market?”. They usually draw the worst of my ire, but whilst you can bat them away with steely eyes and caustic curses it’s hard to deny those in greater need.

Whilst all this hassle this is often distressing, leaving you feeling powerless at best, and more often than not a cruel, cold-hearted, exploitative Westerner, there are also moments of light relief. Top marks have to go, in a very tough field, to the young lad who tried to sell us his wares whilst stood in water up to his knees in Siem Reap’s bus station during one of the frequent torrential downpours. There was no stopping this indomitable little chap. He had us in his sights and, in the pouring rain he bounded over, umbrella in one hand, fruit in the other. He danced up and down on the spot, every inch of him sodden wet yet still bearing a massive grin on his face, “Pineapple sir? Banana?”

You can read Tom and Lara’s full blog entries here.

As promised by Emily and Verity’s podcast below, here is the next installment from Emily and Verity. First of all here’s the blog itself (I am teeth-grindingly jealous):

We’re in Lhasa at the moment. We’ve been here for three days but the computers are broken at our hostel and we’ve only just managed to find somwhere with internet access. Funnily enough though, we’re now in the biggest computer room we’ve ever seen, surrounded by gaming, skyping and msning Chinese and Tibetans, which is slightly surreal.

We tried to do a podcast on the train coming into Lhasa, which was absolutely incredible - the best views we’ve ever seen, and so variable - but there was basically no signal from the day we left Beijing, so we recorded something but when we came to publish it, went through a tunnel and lost the connection. The train itself wasn’t as good as the Russian trains because you couldn’t put the beds up in the daytime and there were six people to a compartment instead of the four we had got used to, (we’ve been a bit spoilt) but the journey was the best yet. We went past small Chinese hill-towns with red new year’s decorations around each door, frozen lakes in the middle of rocky mountains, terraced hills surrounding plains full of polytunnels, impressive snow-topped mountains, and flat, frozen marshes populated by thousands of Yaks and the odd Tibetan (over which we saw the sun rise; there’s only one time zone in China, apparently because the government couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of more, so in the west the sun rises at 8:30am). We couldn’t believe that every time we looked out of the window the view had drastically changed. This filled the time better than eating, which was lucky as we ran out of food on the first day of this forty-eight hour journey - whoops.

Have a look at this slideshow to see a selection of Emily and Verity’s photos.

My favourites are the recycled chairs used as skating devices (absolute genius) and the condensed cow’s breath on the ceiling of the stable (below). I double-dare someone to make an ice-lolly out of it and eat it.