An entire day was set aside for the journey from Siem Reap to Bangkok, in neighbouring Thailand. It’s not really that far, about 300km, and the ticket seller was confident that the bus would take 8 hours. At an average speed of just 37kph (23mph), that doesn’t seem very impressive, but given the state of Cambodia’s roads, it was decidedly optimistic.
We were picked up at 7:30am by a bus from our hotel. Far from the eight hour journey though, this bus took us only to the travel agency down the road, where we had to wait for a second vehicle. But while the first one could barely be described as a bus, this one was not even close. More like a people-carrier. It too only took us a few miles to the central bus station in the town, and so an hour after leaving the hotel, we’d managed to move a distance of about three miles.
Bus number three was more promising. Obviously it didn’t leave until it was full – scheduled timetables just aren’t efficient enough for Cambodian operators, but it did eventually take us out of Siem Reap.
The road to the border was anything but smooth, and seemed to be carrying almost every conceivable type of traffic – bicycles, motorbikes, tuk tuks, pickups, busses, huge trucks, and even people walking, though I don’t think a road grader had been down this way recently. Often the bus had to leave the road completely in order to avoid completely impassable ruts or potholes, and there was dust everywhere. The scenery and passing traffic held my interest for only so long, and after a couple of hours, like every other foreigner on the bus, it was a case of earphones in, volume up, and let the world fade away.
I was brought back to reality by the apparent need for everyone to get off. We couldn’t be at the border so it was an unwelcome disturbance as far as I was concerned, but once off the bus it became apparent that we were definitely better off out than in. The bridge that the driver was about to attempt to cross had clearly not just given passing thought to collapsing, but was actually really quite serious about it. The right hand side had fallen perhaps a metre, and the metal plates covering the surface of the bridge were separating. Everyone walked across, and then the bus rumbled along the left hand side, sticking as close to the edge as possible.
When everyone had piled back into the bus, we resumed the journey to the border, as we did so passing a long line of heavy trucks queued in the opposite direction, none with the slightest chance of making it across the bridge. I wondered what they would do.
Arriving at Poipet, the border town on the Cambodian side, we were given name badges. This would have been impressively organised of the bus company if only they’d had the right names on them, but I discovered I was Mr Hang Seng, director of tourism for the company. My ego swelled with a feeling of importance in my new position, until later I discovered that half the bus were Mr Hang Seng. Fortunately this wasn’t some convoluted visa requirement, just a means for the bus company’s Thai affiliate to find us on the other side of the border.
The Cambodian emigration office was about 300m from the border crossing itself, and after half an hour of queuing, we made our way down the road towards Thailand. On both sides, huge shiny hotel/casino complexes rose out of the otherwise tired and dirty landscape, catering to Thai tourists who came to Cambodia solely to take advantage of the more relaxed gambling laws.
The archway marking the border carried a replica of the spires of Angkor Wat, and beyond that was the Thai immigration office, where another queue awaited us, this time a much longer one. The Thais had less staff, and more computers, but the technology didn’t seem to be speeding things up. While I waited I read all the dire warnings that were plastered everywhere. One started “Persons leaving the kingdom for the purposes of gambling are reminded..” I forget how it finished but it was something like “…are reminded that if you are robbed, raped, murdered or otherwise inconvenienced while on Cambodian soil, tough, don’t come crying to us.” Another warned entrants that involvement with drugs was a serious offence, which came as no surprise. Thailand’s war on drugs has in recent years come dangerously close to a serious breach of human rights, with over 2000 extra-judicial killings by the police of suspected dealers, and those that do get their day in court likely to receive a death sentence anyway.
Bus number 4 left the Thai side of the border about two hours after our arrival half a mile away in Poipet. I have never been so pleased to see a proper road before, and to top it off, they drive on the left. Wonderful.
The state of contentment that resulted from being driven on the correct side of a European-grade road didn’t last very long. The bus stopped after only an hour at a truck stop, and we had to wait for yet another bus to pick us up and finish the journey. Only half an hour, the woman from the bus company said. Then she started waiting tables.
45 minutes later, a bus which had been sitting in the parking area ever since we arrived stirred into life and became bus number 5. Quite a nice bus, in fact, until it broke down two hours out of Bangkok. Luckily evey bus driver in Asia is also an expert mechanic, and after about half an hour we were back on the road.
We arrived at the Khao San Road, backpacker central in Bangkok, at about quarter past 10. Total time taken: 14.5 hours. Average speed: 12mph. A pigeon could have beaten us.