Crossing the Border

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Trying not to spend loads of money i try to do most of my travels by land and or sea, thus figured out from my Lonely Planet travel 'bible' that i could take the bus from Bangkok to the Cambodian border. The 10 minut taxifare cost as much money as my 4.5 hr bustrip to the border. However the way it was described it seemed easy, however when i walked into the bus terminal there was not one english word to be found. After hitting about 6 booths and everyone saying 'ok, it's ok, there... u go there ... i believe i found the right ticket booth. However upon purchasing the ticket again it was in the Thai language. The good thing is there were arabic numbers and thus i found the way to a quite modern AC bus. Old grey-haired mi ended up between the next generation of adventurous foreigners and sat next to a 21-year old american, Brandon who was just released from the army after a 3.5 year tour of duty. The only thing which really struck mi on the ride was (1) how flat this part of Thailand is, it almost looks like the Dutch 'polders' with here and there a few trees and (2) a couple of families living on an unfinished viaduct in a poorly constructed tin-plate hut ... About 2 km before the Thai-Cambodian we got off the bus and Brandon and i shared a Tuktuk to the border. Someone lured us into a 'visa' office and within minutes i realized i almost had fallen for my first scam. By filling out the papers for us they demanded 4x times as much as at the 'official' immigration. With a thankful Brandon we walked for another km and applied for our entry visa. It took us about 45 minutes to get out of Thailand walked through a sort of noman's land (referring to government) filled with casinos and shoppingmalls to end up in a 3hr waiting line to get into Cambodia. From there we took a free bus to the Poipet's taxi terminal, where we could purchase a taxi ticket to Siem Reap. No such luck to get Cambodian cash with my debet/credit card and had almost no thai currency anymore. So had to dig through my suitcase to find €20. This covered my fee of the shared taxi ride with Brandon and a german young man. The ride lasted another 2.5 hrs before we finally arrived where we wanted to go. Immediately the boys (who had partied hard the previous night in Bangkok) fell asleep and i inhaled the poverty witnessed during the ride. And then we arrived on another looking Las Vegas strip with major hotels, nightclubs, flashing neon signs etc. I choked 'oh no, another tourist trap' ... Fortunately i had booked another hotel online and ended up in a little side street in a tall authentic local looking hotel with another 70% discount ...

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