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Day 19 Saturday, January 31, 2009
Due to cost concerns we decided that the best way to return home was to take a bus from Siem Reap, Cambodia to Bangkok, Thailand and fly back to Shenzhen from there. None of us really wanted to visit Bangkok, given all the trouble they’ve had, but it was the cheapest way for us to return to China.
So, early Saturday morning we packed our things, bid farewell to the Siem Reap Hostel, and went to the center of town to wait with all the other suckers who paid $13 for the privilege of riding a second rate bus for several hours. There were about 30 of us all together, each with a giant backpack and a bag or two. So imagine our surprise and concern when a small bus, one that could easily seat all of us if we didn’t have any baggage, pulled up. They started to load our bags first, but as they began to fill the rear seats with our packs it became quickly apparent that there wouldn’t be enough seats for passengers. So the bags came off again. Then the passengers piled in. Then they reloaded our packs
into the aisle. We were hemmed in. One young man, who I guess had been on a potty break, had to board the bus through a side window. Our journey was not beginning well. By the time we were moving (at around 8:30 or 9:00) I already wanted off. The roads were incredibly bumpy. I was sitting on the wheel well and so had no leg room. At one point the driver inexplicably turned off the air conditioning. For what seemed like ages we were roasting in our tightly packed prison until finally a loud-mouthed American with a rich sense of entitlement (ME!) cried uncle and they turned it back on. After about three hours we stopped at a ‘restaurant’, and I use that term loosely, for lunch. We had to climb over everyone’s backpacks to get off the bus. The ‘restaurant’ had one of the most disgusting toilets I’ve ever had to misfortune of using, and I’ve used a Chinese Port-o-john. There was a ‘western’ style basin, but no running water. Instead there was an open cistern of sorts filled with slightly green frog water with a bucket type ladle floating in it. After you did your business you
had to ladle some of the frog water into the basin to make it flush. Ew. The food was sub par but didn’t give me diarrhea, so I was pleased.
After our short lunch break, we were back on the bus and it was another two hours or so to the border. There we unloaded all of our bags and lugged them through customs. Leaving Cambodia was simple and quick. Entering Thailand took for…ev…er! In a slightly perfect world the bus for the second leg of our journey would have been waiting for us on the other side of the border. Instead, WE were left waiting for the bus for over two hours. The bus that finally arrived was a ridiculous shade of pink and airbrushed with Disneyish mermaids. If I had been in a better mood, I might have laughed at it and taken a picture. Onboard I sat next to a very nice Swedish girl and I was looking forward to talking with her. We chatted about our travels and compared notes on the places we had both visited. Then, a mere fifteen or twenty minutes after the weirdsmobile picked us up, it stopped at another ‘restaurant’
for us to eat. NOOOOOO!!!! Despite all the cries of protest, the driver refused to continue on until we had nourished ourselves. S*&t! *sigh* After our snack we all climbed back on the pink prison. I saw my Swedish girl and a man sitting next to her. Hey!
I told him that he was sitting in my seat. He shrugged and said a woman had taken his seat. Within the few seconds this conversation took everyone else had seated themselves leaving me with only one seat to choose from. Well, it was half a seat. And it quickly became one third of a seat when the rather copious gentleman sitting next to me fell asleep and, uh, spread out. So for the next several hours (I can’t remember the exact number because it felt like an eternity) I perched on the edge of the seat or I stood. The icing on the cake was the total lack of air conditioning. No, I’m sorry. The icing on the cake was when we reached Bangkok and the bus dropped us off on some random side street giving us no clue as to where we were.
We hailed a cab easily
Packed Bus 5
My friends back home will appreciate this one as it is reminiscent of all the other "Tiffany trapped in a vehicle surrounded by luggage" photos. enough but he didn’t know where our hostel was so he had to call first for directions. He had a creepy conversation with Kim about how to pronounce the word ‘pedestrian’. By the time we arrived at the hostel we were exhausted, grumpy, and exhausted. We were also exhausted. The events of this day only partially explain the title of my next entry…
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