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Even though we had bought our Cambodian visas in Bangkok we had been warned that the border guards on the Cambodian side would likely demand around five US dollars for "Administration Taxes" that didn't actually exist and would be more accurately named "Cambodian Border Guard Beer Fund". We had been told that you can try and refuse to pay but when we got there and they only asked for one dollar we decided that having a row with an armed and corrupt Cambodian border guard probably wasn't worth the hassle of having a gun pointed in our faces and just paid up. For a country trying to encourage a flourishing tourism trade it wasn't exactly a great introduction.
After border formalities and petty extortion we piled into a waiting minivan with a bunch of other backpackers that was supposed to be taking us to our final destination, Ban Lung. However we only got a couple of hours down the line before we were kicked out at a grim looking town called Stung Treng for some lunch at a cafe. After eating we were driven a few streets away to a grotty looking guesthouse by a petrol station forecourt and told
that we would have to transfer to another bus that would arrive at 2pm. It was 1pm by this point so we didn't complain and settled down for our first cold Ankor Beer in Cambodia. When 2pm came and went with no sign of the bus we asked the guy who seemed to be in charge when it would be showing up and he changed his mind to 2.30pm. This happened again at 2.30pm, and then 3pm, all the way up until the bus finally showed up just before 5pm by which point we'd been watching locals fill up at the pumps for nearly four hours. We got onto the rather ancient looking bus and clambered our way over locals and their various items of peculiar luggage to the only spare seats, right at the back and next to another backpacker, an English guy called Wesley. We set off and started chatting to Wesley who had also had a similar wait at the previous stop and looked almost as fed up with his journey as us!
At the edge of Stung Treng the road turned from loose tarmac into a very rough dirt road and we started bouncing violently
through pot holes and ditches in the suspension-less old bus at a frustratingly slow pace. Before long we were passing through rural Cambodia with occasional wood huts and small villages breaking up the endless landscape of rice fields and trees. A couple of hours later the night drew in and it became pitch black outside making the journey even bumpier as the driver struggled to avoid the many pot-holes and missing sections of road. After about four hours of spine-compacting travel the bus started to get stuck in ditches in the worsening road and inevitably we finally found one that was simply too deep for us to cross. We were all ordered off the bus while the driver and some of the local guys magically located some old bits of wood to lay over the ditch as a makeshift bridge. Amy, Wesley and I chatted to another foreigner who was on the bus, a German guy called Patrick, while watching the rather fragile looking bridge being constructed.
Needless to say, when the bus finally attempted to cross the "bridge" it wasn't an wasn't exactly a complete success. It got halfway over before the weight snapped the wood and the
front of the bus dropped into the middle of the crater. However, the driver just put his foot down and the momentum managed to force the bus to the other side of the ditch, although it very nearly turned over in the process. It would have been funny if this wasn't our only way of making it to Ban Lung. Or anywhere else for that matter. We all got back onto the bus (which was now suspiciously leaking some sort of fluid from the back where a piece of wood had splintered into the undercarriage) and set off again. We only got a few minutes down the road before the same thing happened again. The driver spotted an even bigger hole in the road and we all got off again while another makeshift crossing was planned. However, this hole was about four feet across, stetched the whole width of the road and was about five feet deep so after various creative theories of how to get the bus across the ditch were dismissed the driver just parked at the side of the road and closed the doors. We sat on the side of the road watching the driver and a
couple of other guys talk about what to do and eventually somebody came and told us that we were nearly at Ban Lung and another bus would be sent from the village to pick us up. Somebody told us we could walk it in about 10 minutes but somebody else said it would take an hour so we decided to stay put and wait for the new bus to come. This was about 10pm but at 1am we were still waiting, in darkness, at the side of a rice field in the middle of nowhere in North East Cambodia for rescue. We weren't alone, there were around 40 locals on the bus with us who had now set up camp at the side of the desolate road and seemed quite happy with their lot. Openly showing anger in SE Asia is very frowned upon which is usually quite a good attitude but when things go wrong and everybody just shrugs and sits down while waiting for something better to happen it can be a little counterproductive. Despite our disappearing patience we assumed that the good folk of Ban Lung would not leave their fellow Cambodians out in the road all
night (we wouldn't have been so sure if it had just been us foreigners) and just waited for whatever vehicle would be sent while some of the younger lads teased us with stories of huge poisonous snake that live in the rice fields just behind us.
Just after 1am, one of the Toyota pick-up trucks that the Top Gear team failed to destroy managed to cross the ditch and was flagged down by the locals who started piling onto the back with their luggage. There was not nearly enough room for everybody but they made a pretty good stab of it and got most of the 40 or so people waiting stuffed into the back of a truck that would usually be uncomfortable for 6. Despite offering money for a space we realised that foreigners would be last in the queue and waited to flag down whoever came past next. Fortunately this was only a few minutes later (the pick-up truck still hadn't left as even more people were trying to crowd on) and our saviour was a battered old freight lorry. If you've seen the early Spielberg film "Duel", I swear it was the same vehicle. The driver
of the bus flagged the lorry down once it had traversed the crater and explained what had happened. The trucker agreed to take all four of us if we squashed into the back of his cab, behind the seat on a little ledge. We did briefly ponder the wisdom of hitchhiking with a Cambodian trucker but as our only other option was to wait for another ride on the very empty road in the small hours of the morning we gratefully hopped in and tried our best to squeeze ourselves into the tiny space. It turned out that Ban Lung was actually still an hour's drive away and by the time we finally pulled into the town we were wondering if you can actually die from pins and needles in your legs.
We were dropped at the centre of town near a food market that still had a couple of people lingering about and were miraculously spotted by a guesthouse tout who rushed up to offer us a cheap room. The place sounded ok so we all wearily followed him up a dingy looking road to check it out. When we arrived and found a surprisingly nice looking place
Amy and I booked into a five dollar room and had a wash to remove the grime of the long day. It was gone 2am by the point and we hadn't eaten since lunch at midday so the lady on reception very kindly agreed to cook all four of us some fried rice. We eventually got some well deserved sleep at 3am, having started out our journey the previous morning at 8am, 19 hours prior.
The next morning we met up with Wesley and Patrick at breakfast to decide a plan for the day. The tout who had spotted us at the market the previous night had said he'd meet us at breakfast to offer a variety of tours around the area but the only sight that we were particularly interested in seeing was Yeak Loam Lake, a 50M deep lake that was formed in a volcanic crater about 700,000 years ago and is a popular local spot for swimming and washing. The lake holds a lot of spiritual importance to local tribes who believe that spirits live in the woods around the lake and a great monster lives in the water. However, the lake was only 5km out
of town and the guy was trying to charge us 15 US dollars each to ride pillion with locals on their motorbikes (a very common way to get around in Cambodia knows as "moto") which we thought was a bit much. It was off season but taking 60 dollars for driving 4 foreigners just 5km seemed rather cheeky so we sent him packing. There were a couple of waterfalls in the area that we would have gone to see if the tours were a decent price but we have seen a lot of waterfalls recently and I don't think that any are going to beat Tad Kuang Si for memories. So we set out walking.
Ban Lung wasn't any more attractive by day than it was by night but we soon reached the edge of town and started walking down the red clay road to the lake. On the way we passed various small huts and houses along the side of the road and the local children seemed very excited to see four white people walking past. Most of them waved and shouted out "Sua s'dei" which means hello in Khymer (the Cambodian language) as we went by. The kids in Cambodia seem particularly cute and even me and Amy, hardened child-phobes that we are, were grinning and calling sua s'dei back before long. After about half an hour of walking we reached the turning we were looking for and turned off to a smaller road leading towards the lake. We walked past a group of children walking there too and they were equally as amused by our presence as the other kids so decided to follow us, running ahead and then watching us catch up before doing the same again. Eventually, hot and sweating in another very hot day, we reached the entrance of the lake, paid the 1 US dollar entrance fee and walked down the steps to the crater. Stupidly, both Amy and I had expected something quite small, perhaps the size of a large swimming pool, but the lake was 800 metres across and quite stunning. There were a few little piers around the lake and we walked about halfway round to find a nice secluded one with no locals on it before sitting down and dangling our feet in the water, flouting the warnings of a local nessie-like creature lurking in the depths. The lake was eerily still and before long weird little shrimp like creatures had congregated around our feet and seemed very interested in them. It was at this point we decided against going for a swim. Instead we sat on the pier for a couple of hours, watching the shrimp things cleaning our feet and chatting.
On the way back to town we were utterly baking so decided to stop off for a beer at a nice little place near the lake for a couple of cold ones. We sat putting the world to rights with a couple of iced Anchor beers before making the trek back to the guesthouse and a nap after a lovely chilled afternoon.
The next morning we booked onto a minibus heading to Siem Reap. We paid 22 dollars each for it in the hope that it would be a little more pleasant than the large local bus that had (mostly) brought us to Ban Lung. We were wrong. When the van turned up it was already full of locals and durians so we had to squash into the very back seats amongst all the bags and fruit for the long journey west. It was rather annoying, especially as we got the impression that the locals hadn't paid anywhere near 22 dollars a ticket but as the only other bus running the route had spectacularly failed in its task only two nigths prior we sat hunched and irritated in the back minding our own business.
The road network in Cambodia isn't particularly well developed so in order to get to Siem Reap in the north west from Ban Lung in the north east you have to go all the way down to Phnom Penh in the central south before going back up again. This meant that the journey took twice as long as it should have done and also required a change of bus half way, thankfully to a more comfortable large bus that continued on to Siem Reap.
Siem Reap literally translates as Siamese (the ancient name for Thailand) Defeated and comes from when the Khmer Empire seized the city from the Siamese Empire in the 17th century. Hardly the most tactful name for a major tourist city right near the Thai border! It is best known as the nearest city to the ruins of Angkor but we were only planning on stopping over a couple of nights before heading onto nearby Battambang and doing Angkor on the way back with Diane.
After our first couple of days in Cambodia I admit we didn't have a particularly good impression. Stung Treng was unfriendly and ugly, we'd endured two hellish journies, most people in Ban Lung had tried to overcharge or con us (including the guesthouse receptionist who had tried to snare us in a fake gem scam!!) and we had a general sense of being somewhat unwelcome. Within minutes of arriving at Siem Reap this changed. We arrived grumpy and dirty after a 12 hour journey and snapped at the poor tuk tuk driver who offered us a ride as we got off the coach. After he smiled disarmingly and said that for only 2 US dollars he'd take us around all the guesthouses until we found one we liked we softened and got in. He chatted to us all the way to the centre of town and was a lovely friendly guy. He stayed true to his word and took us round a couple of places until we found one that had a room, was cheap and looked nice. We gave the driver a one dollar tip that was very gratefully received (he kissed my hand!) and went to check into the room. The guesthouse, accurately called "Popular Guesthouse" was clean and welcoming and for only 8 US dollars we got a large clean room with a fan, satellite tv and a big comfy bed. The staff were all really nice and even programmed the tv to a channel that would pick up the champions league final for us. After a shower we ate some very tasty dinner at the guesthouse's rooftop restaurant and went to bed with a changed impression of Cambodia.
The next day was one of relaxation and we wandered around the town getting our bearings for when Diane arrives in a couple of days time. We learnt some more Khmer words and also bought ourselves some of the very popular checked scarves called kramas that virtually every Cambodian seems to wear. They are apparantely a real sign of Cambodian identity and are used as scarves, bandanas, sarongs, towels, bags, masks against the red dust that seems to be everywhere and in any other manner in which they can be employed. That night we went to a recommended restaurant and tried fish amok, a delicious traditional Khmer dish that consists of steamed fish in a thick creamy coconut curry wrapped in a banana leaf and served with rice. It was delicious and I can see why many Cambodians rave about it. After dinner we sat in a pub and watched the city go by before heading back to the guesthouse to watch the football and get an early night in preparation for an early bus to Battambang the next morning.
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