One if by land...

July 8th, 9:52pm - Siem Reap, Cambodia

What a crazy day of travel. Let me say that the trip between Bangkok and Siem Reap (the city in Cambodia close to the Angkor Wat) is a long one. One bar in Siem Reap sells t-shirts to travelers mocking this fact. Those of you interested in the more backpack-ish nature of my travels will enjoy this.

The first step is getting onto an 8:30am bus that takes you from a pick-up point in Bangkok to the Cambodian border. This was actually a semi-decent coach bus with air conditioning and everything. I met some cool people (long bus rides are great to meet people) and even got into a juggling challenge with a woman across the aisle. On one of our stops I tried some cool foods, cooked watermelon seeds and chili-paste chips. The entire ride was about 4-5 hours and included some stops at tourist rip-off restaurants to further milk our money.

Once we hit the border, the world shifted very very fast. On the Thai side we were mostly driving by open fields and the occasional farmer. On the Cambodian side we hit immediate poverty and homelessness. People are living in extremely ramshackle dwellings and heartbreaking moments with young children asking for you to buy something are common. After our visa process, I bought some noodles and vegetables off of a street vendor and tried to teach some Cambodians to juggle. All of the Cambodian people I've met have been incredibly friendly and well-meaning, which has been great.

By the time the bus came to take us to Siem Reap I'd befriended an American from NYC named Dan, a great, very relaxed guy who I've been traveling around with. More about him later.

The bus ride to Siem Reap was, as my parents would say, a character builder. On the Cambodian border there are very few air conditioned buses, and ours was no exception. It was also chock full of people, to the point that one person had to sit in the aisle on the ground. Luckily this is the shorter leg of the journey, only 4 hours. Unluckily the Cambodian roads are equivalent to poverty stricken baseball fields in the states, and there was some intense rain. I took a short nap and woke up to a pitch black night, a very bumpy ride, slow going in the rain, and about 2 inches to breathe. On the bright side, the woman next to me was Spanish, and I spent about 2 hours talking to her in her native tongue. While my Spanish is very broken, she complemented me a couple of times on communicating some random concepts (the Salem Witch Trials, economic consulting) and overall we got along great.

This is where it gets a bit crazy. We stopped at a restaurant on the way back (had a variant of Tom-Yum soup), and when we boarded the bus there was darkness on the street only a lack of electricity can produce. The bus passengers had played a bit of musical chairs and I got the 1st of the 2 last seats on the bus. The 2 screwed people were a young man and his wife, who guilted me into giving them the spot so that he could "sit with his wife". Since the floor was very dirty, I stood at the front of the bus and leaned against some of the giant backpacks that took up the front two seats . Due to the rain and the potholes and the slow going, as well as the night and the main road being impassable due to mud, this part of the trip took 6 hours. Like I said, character builder.

Since there wasn't much else to do, the bus driver and I chatted about life. Getting stuck without a seat turned into a blessing. Following is a summary of some of the interesting things he mentioned (so everything is one man's POV): Like the US-Mexican citizen issue, Cambodians have an issue with Vietnamese that come into the country without a Visa. Since the government doesn't enforce visa usage, many many Vietnamese come in each year. There is conflict over jobs, over culture, over prostitution (the Cambodian feeling is that the Vietnamese women come over and prostitute themselves). With the elections coming in one month, the feeling is that the next government should patrol the border and kick out current un-visa'ed Vietnamese... probably not a conflict-free undertaking.

In fact the elections here are a huge deal. The same party, the Cambodian People's party, has been in power for the last 15 years. There is a huge poverty issue in the country, as well as an education problem and general discontent, and everyone is talking about what will happen when the polls close and the new (or old) Prime Minister takes power. The bus driver talked about the corruption of the police here, and that many violent crimes are unpunished because wealthier kids have connections or money to bribe their way out. Dan offered to switch seats with me a couple of times, which was great, but in the end I stood up and chatted most of the time.

When we arrived in Siem Reap, the bus driver pulled off the scam Dan mentioned from the moment we got on our first bus: By the time we got back it was too late to book any hotel but the one owned by the bus driver. So although the price was good (Dan and I split a room) and it was clean, we could have gotten a lot more out of the night if we'd had the chance to travel.

We played some cards, I taught Dan a game called Durak, and overall tried to pass the time before bed. Walking around the place at night was like visiting a ghost town, and we got solicited for our first prostitute of Cambodia about 15 minutes into our walk. Since everyone was staring at us, we got out of there and went to bed. Tomorrow, Angkor Wat!