'Snot Fair

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Why is it so difficult for a humble blogger? All I want is either an easy time so that my travels are as enjoyable as possible or an absolutely awful time so I can moan about it here. What is of no benefit to me is an experience that is half of each. As I have already said previously in my posts my motto while traveling is "Subtlety? Sod It." Honestly.

So the point of this post is that I've crossed the Thailand-Cambodian border, my first land border crossing if you don't count EU borders, which don't. And everything went absolutely fine on the Thai side. Yvonne and I took a practically luxurious coach. Much better than anything National Express can offer. It had air-con! And seats that let you lie horizontally! The gulf between this and India's buses (where they were so packed my face was pressed against the window) is indescribably wide.

So the first leg was fine and with Yvonne's help I crossed the border without getting ripped off over my visa and I got another stamp in my passport. Got quite a few now! However crossing the border by land means that your first point in Cambodia is Poipet. My suggested slogan for the town is "Poipet: Cambodia's way of telling you to leave." I've never seen a more hopeless place in my life and I mean that entirely sincerely. What sort of place to live is it when you constantly watch people leave the dusty concrete bunker that you are stuck in and any westerners who arrive get on buses and in taxis as soon as possible or else rush into ugly air conditioned casinos. This was the place Yvonne and myself in. What's worse we had arrived too late for the last bus to Siem Reap. This meant our only option was a $50 taxi. We prevaricated over paying up, really quite pointlessly, for ages for two reasons. The first was that we were followed everywhere in Poipet to the point of it being extremely unnerving. All they were trying to do was convince us to take a taxi, but when one man had followed us across the border itself and the police were also following us we couldn't help but wonder that if we took the taxi we would be conned or worse. The second factor influencing our decision was a group of American tourists who were slightly less travel-hardened than we were and were even more paranoid than we were. Being the only other westerners around this paranoia then rubbed onto us. Fortunately one of the Americans' dads was the Mexican ambassador to Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. This meant his parents had lots of contacts in the area and were able to arrange taxis remotely to come and take us to Siem Reap. So after a 3 hour bout of overt suspicion we got into a taxi that ultimately only cost us $25 each to take us quite a considerable distance. The taxi was also air-conditioned. Such is life.

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