Border Crossing

Beth Arrives...

So Beth flew in to Bangkok and arrived at the hostel on the morning of the 14th. She had had a blast in India, but was sooo glad to be back in "civilization." Apparently cows commonly block traffic, there are disabled homeless people everywhere, and 10 out of 12 people in her tour group got violently ill (including her) in India. Needless to say, she was happy to be in Bangkok.

We took a little while to get going that morning. Beth was pretty tired, and I was a little worn down from the time change, the heat, and the water fights. I hadn't seen any of the "big" sights in Bangkok yet, wanting to save those for when Beth was there, so we saw the Grand Palace and the giant reclining Buddha at Wat Pho. The Grand Palace was absolutely beautiful. The grounds were huge and all the buildings were incredibly ornate. The giant reclining Buddha at Wat Pho was absolutely HUGE. It was really hard to capture the enormity of it in a picture. Generally, I definitely believe that Southeast Asian religious art/temples are sooo much cooler than Western ones.

So all day Beth and I had been pelted with water for Songkran (Thai New Year), but that definitely didn't even come close to comparing with what we experienced on Khao San road. That road is the "backpacker's haven." It basically is the center for all of the cheap hostels and touristy bars in Bangkok. Beth and I wanted to check it out before heading back to the hostel. The streets around that area were packed with people throwing water and chalking our faces, so we thought we'd get a way from it a bit on Thanon Khao San. We were wrong. We entered the road from a tiny little alleyway and walked into absolute chaos. Within seconds we were so wet that I think I would have been dryer had I been standing in a pool. We finally fought our way through the crowd to a hostel bar to sit and have a beer, and perhaps get away from the mayhem. That plan didn't really work out too well for us, as we were soon involved in a very heated waterfight with a table of Indian guys. Bottles of water were purchased to load the water guns on both sides, but instead of loading the guns, time was saved by simply dumping entire bottles of water over others' heads. We spent the rest of the night on Khao San Road, enjoying the festivities.

Border Crossing:

We were pretty tired the next morning, but got up at 4:15 in order to catch the 5:55 train out of Bangkok to Cambodia. The train was fairly decent, especially since it cost us $1 each. The morning past pretty nicely. The cars weren't air conditioned, but large open windows provided a pretty relaxing breeze. By about 10am, though, it was too hot outside for the breeze to sufficiently cool us, so we spent the last hour and a half roasting.

The train took us to Aranyprathet, the border town in Thailand across from Poipet, in Cambodia. The border crossing was a little too complex, in my mind, for 100-degree temperature at midday in Southeast Asia. We had to stop at Aranyprathet, take a tuk-tuk to the border crossing, stand in a line to check out of Thailand, literally cross a "no man's land," expanse where you really aren't in any country in particular, then stand in an incredibly long, extremely hot line to get our passports and visas checked at the Cambodian border. By this point, Beth and I had only had a croissant and some potato chips to eat and it was about 12:30. Now our dinner the previous night had consisted of beer, so we were pretty famished. Unfortunately the only food I could procure for us at the border shop was some sort of very stale toast and a wierd macadamian-nut-tasting chip-type-thing. It may have been a good thing to not have eaten, though, as the three-hour cab ride we took from Poipet to Siem Reap was the bumpiest ride I have ever taken. My head came close to hitting the roof a couple of times. Did I write that this was a road? Excuse my mistake, it was more like a collection of pot holes.

Thirteen hours later, at 6:00pm, - and looking extremely disgusting, might I add - we finally arrived at our hostel in Siem Reap, we ate dinner, and we went to bed.

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