Cambodia - Pai lin: Making a run for the border

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Karma - if I didn't believe it before this trip, I do now. I've seen first hand how Karma will kick someone it the derriere if they aren't nice. So when I got sick, I knew what I had done to deserve this punishment but then fate has a funny way of turning things around .... We were heading from Battambang towards Pai lin (a town near the Thailand border) and had been warned from the beginning that this was a challenging part of the tour. Margaret joined me on the bus due to a sore tailbone (we are now so close I got the privilege of placing a patch on her fanny) and it was nice to have some company. Before you begin to think it was a piece of cake in the bus, you are mistaken. This bus was all over the road trying to avoid the BIG potholes but still found a small ones every 10 feet. Everyone on bike had to wear masks due to the massive amounts of dust on the road. I don't know why this road was any dustier than the others because it looked just the same - red, dry with lots of potholes and rocks. To help keep me busy, I decided to be the cheerleader and official supplier of liquids to the riders, I was even handing out water to the guys while we were still driving (they were now racing and didn't want to stop). There was a time when you couldn't even see the guys through all the dust and then I realized that my stomach issue was really a blessing in disguise. Thank you Buddha. Margaret and I were laughing at the thought of us trying to be out on this road with all the dust, hills, grueling heat and sun. Thanks but no thanks, it just wouldn't be fun. Since the girls weren't riding the guys were able to make record time and we were in Pai lin three hours earlier than expected. Our hotel was cute but that was it. There was nothing here, no pool and no real town. What were we going to do ... and then ... brilliance was born. We found out that we were only 17km from the Thai border and only a couple of hours to the beach, our next tour stop. While we were not eager to leave our guide Sna, we were indeed impatient to leave all the dusty roads behind. We were determined to leave and the people that are going to ensure that we bust out of Cambodia (Margaret, Ricardo and myself) head to the border and find out what we need to do to leave the country and arrange for a car to drive us all to our new hotel. As much as we wanted to take Sna and our driver with us, since they did not have passports they were not allowed to leave. On a side note - Sna said that when he gets back to Phnom Penh, he's applying for a passport! After all the phone calls, driving back and forth - within a couple of hours we were all packed, filling out our Cambodia / Thailand paperwork and in a new van heading to Chao Lao Beach - and just in time as we were the last ones to cross over before they closed the border. As I was with Vietnam, I was a bit sad that my time in Cambodia was over but ready for the next leg of my trip.

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