The bus ride from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh

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Travel days are never my favourite day on holiday, especially when it's a 6 hour bus ride on a road that isn't anywhere near what I thought it woud be.

The day started sadly as I said goodbye to Siem Reap, to the lovely staff of The Villa and to one of the tour guides who escorted me around the temples who has to be one of the most gentle men I have ever met in my life.

I was picked up from my guest house in a minibus just before 8am in the morning. The minibus was already mostly full of people with eight of them being from a Singapore university on an end of study adventure. We talked for most of the minibus trip from the centre of Siem Reap to the bus depot but unfortunately were seated away from each other on the main bus so we couldn't talk.

The main bus was clean, they gave us a bottle of water to start with and there was entertainment but the entertainment was in Khmer so I put in my iPod and opened up the book that Louise from one of my group tours suggested I read prior to going to the killing fields in Phnom Penh called 'First they killed my father'. This potentialyl wasn't the est book to start reading on a day when I was already slightly sad for leaving Siem Reap as it details the struggles of one family throughout the Khmer Rouge control of Cambodia.

The road out of Siem Reap I'd actually travelled a number of times on my tours, so I knew that the first 40 minutes or so was quite smooth by Cambodian standards and I expected that the rest would be the same seeing as the road connected the biggest and third biggest cities in the country. I was wrong.

The road close to Siem Reap is fine, however as you get further away it starts to deteriorate. At first it is small patches of road where it looks like road works have been started but not finished, then it gets to kilometer stretches of dirt road. The part that shocked me about the trip was that as we got 50km or so from the capital the road totally deteriorated into a small lane of sealed road and a massive dirt section beside it. The sealed section was big enough only for one car at a time to be on it, so our bus was constantly in the dirt. As we got closer down this long stretch it appears as though they are working on this road, the dirt section being newly built up and hopefully will be soon sealed however they are buildingthe retaining wall on the side using cement mixers you'd see someone use at home not industrial ones and it looks like it'll be a long process, and with the wet season starting it may not be sealed in time.

The other tricky part was the stopping at around 11am at a smallish town for a meal break. The university students and I sdecided to walk to an alternate restaurant to the one the bus pulled up out front of, thankfully the restaurants on this road are used to preparing food quickly and we had finished eating just as the bus drove past slowly tooting it's horn for us to come out. At least they count heads to make sure no-one is left behind!

My 6'2 frame didn't like being cramped up in the bus for so long, my butt went numb a number of times and my knee and hamstring ached a little from being kept in such a small area for so long, but that is also due to sporting injuries. After this experience I'm kind of worried about the 6-7 hour bus ride to Kratie and the subsequent 5 hours to Ban Lung in a weeks time, not to mention the epic 12-13 hour bus ride back from Ban Lung to the capital on the 16 June!

All in all my first bus experience in Cambodia was ok, but it definitely brought me back down to Earth after the ecstacy of my time in Siem Reap.

Tomorrow it's a day trip to the killing fields, Toul Sleng Museum and if I have time after that I will take in the Wat Phnom and Wat Ounalom as a pick me up after what will probably be a heartwrenching morning.

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