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Thursday, 7 May, Bangkok Tonight, a very brief stopover in Bangkok on our way to Khao Lak, north of the resort town of Phuket.... |
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A car ride from Siem Reap to the bustling dusty border town of Poipet gave us a chance to see more of the Cambodian countryside. This meant coping once again with the sometimes erratic and cavalier driving styles of Cambodians. Our driver never once topped 100kph, but I was still alarmed on more than a few occasions, as the traffic ebbed and flowed around us - bicycles exiled to the outer edge, motorcycles driving and diving to wherever they saw an opening, overloaded trucks lumbering along and cars making three lanes where there were only two. In Cambodia, the use of horns doesn't always (almost never) signal road rage - it merely alerts other traffic to your presence, sort of like a tap on the shoulder, but it's a technique totally over-used by our driver today. He was on the horn constantly, for nearly all the 200km. There was no point in remonstrating with him - he wouldn't have understood me since I can't speak Cambodian! On the way, he stopped at a roadside stall - a butcher shop! We gathered that the meat there at the farm was only half the price it was in Siem Reap or Poipet, and that his son liked soup and noodles with meat. Other roadside stalls sell all the usual snacks and fruit and vegetables, but in SE Asia there is one unusual offering: one litre bottles of fuel. These are aimed mainly at motorcyclists who prefer the budget amounts at what they say are cheaper prices than the big service stations. We'd been warned in various travel guides about the chaotic border crossing at Poipet, but that didn't fully prepare me for the reality. Dave says the only time he's seen anything like it was at a couple of frontiers in Africa, but this was a first for me. On the Thai side, trucks were lined up for many kilometres approaching the border - not so many going the other way I'm not sure where the blockage actually was, .. Amazing scenes everywhere as people and vehicles jostled to get in the right queues, all of this in temperatures hitting 40degrees. My tolerance for heat was disappearing fast. Our luggage was whisked away by an arrangement between our driver and a lady he knew - for a payment of 200 baht (about $5) she strapped our bags onto her trolley, and promised we would see them on the other side. Once before we had come across this sort of manouevre, in Jordan I think, so I tried not to worry too much about whether or not we would see our bags again. Long lines of mostly locals and some Western tourists queue up in halls with barely functioning air conditioning, fans working flat out, to have our passports stamped with a 15 day Thai visa. Our rendezvous with our baggage lady was delayed by the Thai border police who corralled everyone and everything off to one side, all to allow some VIP and his 20-car entourage unimpeded passage through the checkpoint, while we waited, fried by the burning sun on the bitumen without shade, and not really knowing what was going on. When the official cars cleared the scene, we were reunited with our bags, and were found a tuk tuk by a tout who seemed to be the agent for all the tuk tuks milling around. On principle, I suppose we should have tried to ignore the tout, but it was the easiest way to get where we wanted to go, the local railway station, Aranyaprathet, seven kilometres from the border. It was actually a pretty reasonable deal. Although we then had a three hour wait for the train, we elected to go by rail to Bangkok, because I like train travel. |
 
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