Cambodia. A nice place to live.

---

Well right now I am lying down on a bed made from a piece of heaven itself (it’s actually foam) but after the past 37 hours it feels amazing.
So after my rant on school and the plan for Cambodia, I am actually now here after hours of torture on trains and busses and queues (lines). Dan and I had decided to check out of our rooms early as we weren’t going to be sleeping in them and we may as well stay awake and power through as we were leaving for the train station at around 4 am. This turned out to be a money saver but at the same time a life killer.
The day went by quite fast and before we knew it , it was 11 pm. I thought that 4 am was going to come faster than Christmas. Anyway after going on the internet a few times and walking around and then sitting down, I encountered the longest 45 minutes of my life. A young quite attractive looking Asian lady asked me if she could sit down. I wanted to say no but you cant really say that can you? Any way after I carried out the standard “neck check” my suspicion was confirmed. To the locals she is known as a katoi, to me and you a lady boy. Now this term I don’t like to use but I honestly don’t know what the correct one is. In every other country there are men who dress as women, or want to be women but Thailand has a genuine third gender. Everywhere you look there are katois. Working in 7 11 and just everyone carries on about their business without thinking that it is odd and rightly so.
What I don’t understand is that people can like the same sex and as I said before may even change sex. How come it is so common in Thailand though? I will call them women as that is what they want to be. So what drives these women to do this? Is it the sex trade that is so open here? Or is it a genuine desire to be a woman? I don’t intend to try and answer these questions, just wonder about them. As for the horrid 45 minutes of bad conversation from the katoi who it turned out was after 15 baht to call her brother. 4 am finally arrived. We must have advertised for everyone to try and harass us this night as we got in a metre taxi (which you should always do as they are cheaper than tuk tuks if the distance is far) and the driver as always tried to just charge 150 baht with no metre when I know for a fact that it costs around 65-70 so I declined his offer. All the way there he tried to tell us he would drive us for 3 hours to the border for 2000 baht (around 40 pounds) again I declined his offer about 6 or 7 seven more times. We arrived at the station and we were told to be there for 5 as to buy the tickets. So to make sure, we got there at 4 30. We bought them and then had to wait for 1 and a half hours to board the train.
I thought that the train would be empty as it was so early but it was full of Thai people. I don’t know why they were all going to Aranya Prathet but they all got the train for free which is why it was so crowded. An elderly woman saw that me and Dan had nowhere to sit and moved across for us. I then had the pleasure of the cold morning air hitting me, so much so that I had to put on my sweater. I also had to endure the lovely what can only be described as….. “Random bits of crap” hit me in the face and eyes for the majority of the journey. This 5 hour journey seemed to take forever but half way through the elderly woman had bought a lot of food with her and offered it to me. I said no at first but after the 3rd or 4th was item thrust in my face I accepted, it was a boutze or steamed bun that are actually what I’ve had before in china. I ate them and they were good. The lady then offered me water. This was clearly from some kind of river, Stream, sewer, or non conventional water collection point. I said no and she wouldn’t take that for an answer and so I took the bottle with her eyes burning into me the whole time and took a swig!!! Oh dear that isn’t very nice , was not what I was thinking but as there are respectable people reading this we will just say it is. I have found a new talent today of not hurting elderly foreign women’s feelings by managing to keep a smile on my face whilst drinking what could possibly be raw sewage. I then offered to give the bottle back but she gestured that I should give it back when I’d finished with it. Well I had so I casually put it to the side of me and pretended to fall asleep. In all honesty pretend to sleep was all I could do as the seats were so hard and cramped you would actually die of insomnia if you were forced to.
When I “awoke” the woman had taken the bottle back (my prayer had been answered) and as a bonus, I had not died from drinking the water. So I was quite happy. The train had pulled into the last stop of Anaya Prathet, to which 20 men boarded and started to run up and down the aisle. You would think we were being hi jacked but it turned out to be the tuk tuk drivers wanting to get the first passengers.
This is where it gets a little annoying.
With the same thing happening at the Laos border, I knew that they were going to take me to the “visa office” and fill out the paper work and charge a lot. This did indeed happen and they also managed to get me to pay for a bus to go straight to Siem Riep. I was charged 1700 baht for all of this but this was less than what other people had paid so I was glad I hadn’t been ripped off. I went back on the tuk tuk and we headed for the border were we waited to go through and get our Thai visa revoked and stamped, I then assumed as I already had a Cambodia stamp/visa that I was in Cambodia. However, it was not so. Even though I had walked past a huge sign saying I was in Cambodia, I still wasn’t quite there yet.
I walked through to a small, definitely meant for no more than 5 people building and found around 70 people waiting to get their stamp for entry to Cambodia. Although there was no security, I could have walked around the building and entered without a stamp but I thought it best to get it to save me some trouble in the long run. More and more people were coming in the building and more and more people were pushing in front of others and tempers were flaring. But I had a special weapon…… I have queued up in china before. This therefore qualifies me to randomly and blatantly push in front of other people and block people trying to push in front of me. Whilst letting their torrent of abuse, go by with nothing more than a snigger. I had conquered the line in 2 hours and got my stamp. This was a personal best after the Laos fiasco. Then it was to the bus ……..
This bus is a scam bus and I knew it was but I wasn’t going to let it scam me as I try to learn from my mistakes. The bus itself was as cramped as you could think and had no leg room and was extremely hot. It was going to take 5 hours to get to siem riep and a mandatory stop along the way so they can get commission with a restaurant they have a deal with. They also drive slow, so that when you get to where they take you, you are so tired you don’t care how much you pay or where you stay.
Anyway, that’s enough about that for a minute. I was now in Cambodia a country renowned for the Angkor city, and also it’s darker civil war side that had led to the country having more amputees per capita than any other in the world thanks to the millions of land mines that still cover most of this country’s jungle and farmland. The first thing I noticed was how flat this country is the rice fields go on forever. Also, the roads, they seem to be building the main road through Cambodia all at once instead of in sections. This has lead to it being one huge pile of rubble that kicks up a lot of dust. There are a lot of bridges here that you can’t go across and you drive down the side of the dirt track instead (see photo). The bus journey was not a pleasant one which still I got no sleep but we eventually made it to Siem Riep. Now back to the scam…..
What basically happens, is the bus stops off at the edge of town where they say you can’t go with a bus when other busses are clearly going right by you, there just happens to be about 15 tuk tuks waiting to take you for free to the town centre and take you to a “cheap” hotel this is one they will of course get commission for. I told them to give me the tuk tuk and I know where I am going already and it wasn’t near the centre. Of course they left us there and then tried to charge us when they said it was free. I didn’t bother arguing as they are not evil people; they just live in a country where they are not economically privileged as others. This in turn leads them to believe that everyone else from other countries, are much more privileged than they are. As many people know, not everybody is. We ended up getting a tuk tuk who wasn’t part of the scam paying 100 baht between three of us (a random person who had jumped in) and getting to where I wanted to go. This takes me back to the beginning, I have now showered gone out to eat and just relaxed after around 36 hours of uncomfortable chairs and no sleep and now I lie on this mattress which is definitely up in the top 5 comfiest I’ve slept in on my travels. And of course now I can’t sleep and I’m not tired.
It just goes to show how much stress the human body can be sometimes. Maybe it’s something in the water. 
Peace x

---