Welcome to Scambodia

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Cambodia. I am still not sure if I love or hate this country. It exhausted me emotionally. The poor dirty streets of its cities do not attract me at all. There is always someone who wants to sell you something. We don't trust people here anymore as we always need to bargain for everything we want to buy and every seller offers a different price. It seems like they want to rip you off every time. Perhaps this can be explained by the history of the Cambodian people and this is just the story of how we got to know them. Our trip started with the ancient temples of Angkor in Siem Reap and finished in Phnom Penh with the story of the Khmer Rouge Regime.

Our trip from the island to Siem Reap was done by boat from Koh Thao to Champhon. From there we had to take a "vip" bus to Bangkok and from there another bus to Siem Reap. We successfully arrived in Bangkok where we had to wait for our bus from 3am until 7am in a McDonalds restaurant on the biggest pub street in town. It was an interesting experience spotting European kids being absolutely drunk and acting like jerks while being far from home (and its social control). In McDonalds we met two Czech girls with whom we later traveled in the rest of Cambodia. At 7 in the morning we were guided to our bus. At this moment we realized that the lady who sold our tickets forgot to mention that vip sleeping bus will be available only until Bangkok. So, we were loaded into a minivan which had nothing to do with any definition of comfort. Every 1.5-2 hours our driver had to stop near some shops or restaurants (sponsors?) and everyone had to leave the bus for around 20 minutes. In total we made 4-5 stops. Our last stop looked like another restaurant with the exception that several fluent-English speaking Thais separated us in small groups so that we had to sit at different tables around the restaurant. A nice looking lady approached and told us that we had to fill in the papers she gave us, give her our passport and pay her 1.300 bhat in cash immediately for the Cambodian VISA. The usual price for a visa to Cambodia is $25 but in this particular case they were charging us almost twice as much. The explanation they gave us was that they could do it super fast preventing us from waiting in a row for several hours so that we were able to take the bus, otherwise we had to wait for 2-3 hours until the bus of 4pm (or the bus of 5pm or 7pm)..

Everyone realized that this was a scam, but we thought this might compensate for the relatively cheap combination ticket from Koh Tao to Siem Reap we bought earlier. Also we had no idea how far the border was (they were saying 10km, in fact it wasn't even 1km). So we decided to buy the expensive visa as we had no idea if the lady was actually speaking the truth or not. Our Czech friends wanted to get the receipt from the lady so they could get their money back from their Czech university because they were doing a summer-course in Cambodia, but this wasn't possible because we had to say it earlier before she disappeared with our passports. Before we actually paid her all of our passports already contained a sticker with a visa. So if we wanted to have a receipt she could rip the visa out of our passport and we could do everything by our selfs effectively meaning the bus would leave without us. After receiving a very strange receipt (with a little more arguing) we had to wait, but no one said for how long. After some more complaints we were brought to the border. We had no tickets/stickers for the bus, nothing that could proof we were traveling with 'the company' and at the boarder we had to do everything the Thai lady said we would not have to: waiting in lines for hours (next to people who had no visa's yet) and (later) waiting for the bus at 4 pm. After the passport control we had to precede to a bus station. There the 'tour operator' told us that by a mistake they booked 5 people too much on the bus of 3pm so some people would have to wait until the next bus...or they could go with his mini bus that would cost them an additional 150 baht (approximately 3-4€) per person. 150 baht isn't much (some people were taking his offer) but we felt scammed already so we weren't paying the company any more money! We waited for half an hour after which the story of the tour operator changed: the bus is already here but it leaves when it's full. In the meanwhile more people were literally buying his story and taking the mini-bus which resulted in less and less people that could "fill" the bus. The only people that were still resisting were the Czech girls, a Jewish Israeli and ourselves. The Israeli and me (Bart) joined forces and confronted the tour operator with his scam after which he laughed devilishly and continued his show. We didn't give up and continued rallying more troops by telling the truth to more and more travelers who were waiting for the never-arriving-bus. After some time the tour operator became really annoyed and told us we could wait in the bus because it would leave at 4:30pm. In fact he wanted us to shut up as we were "stealing" his customers. While we were waiting in the bus I could see the tour operator performing the same trick again to other travelers while not interrupted by the Israeli-Dutch front so I went out of the bus and continued spreading the truth. Then the tour-operator got really annoyed (right back at you!) but their wasn't anything else he could do because the bus was finally filled up. Before we left a police officer entered the bus. I was telling to myself relax, don't do anything even if he takes you out of the bus but I was so pissed... Another tour operator entered the bus after the police officer to check our tickets/stickers (which they didn't give us, remember?) but luckily we found them laying on the ground (they fell of some fellow traveler?) while waiting at the border earlier. During the bus ride I had to listen to some serious aggressive music to blow some steam off (thank you Meshuggah). The 2-3 hour bus trip was nice, with the usual stop at an affiliated restaurant were the company earned some money for dropping a bus full of tourists, but the story doesn't end..yet... During the bus-ride I was checking my ipad (google maps) to make sure we were going the right way as I expected something else fishy. When we arrived in Siem Reap they told us that they couldn't stop at the bus station or anywhere near the city centre so we had to pay some money for the tuktuks. After the earlier scamming the Czech girls, the Israeli Jew, ourselves and some other Chinese travelers we saved from spending money on the mini-bus felt like a team so we bargained really hard to let them feel our frustrations.

By the way, did I mention that I had an infection in my foot (probably from the coral in Koh Tao)? My left foot was twice as big and red like a pepper. Luckily I bought some antibiotics back in Bangkok.

Finally...Siem Reap, adjacent to one of the world wonders: Ankor Wat. But after this long trip the only thing we wanted to do was eating properly, showering properly (our budget hotel had a pool) and sleeping properly!

The following day we still wanted to relax a little so we went to the "old market" where they have hundreds of shops selling the same things. Without pictures this post would be boring so we included some pictures of the marketplace and the nice Khmer Cuisine.

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