The Journey from Bangkok to Siem Reap

The first leg of our journey begins upon arriving in Bangkok around 2AM Saturday morning. Bangkok's main airport is really top-notch: it was built fairly recently to accommodate the booming tourism industry and unlike certain airports (like Detroit metro for example) its layout actually makes sense. Plus, it's architecture is just plain cool to look at.

After passing through immigration, we hitched a taxi over to Hua Lampong Train Station, a facility which is really a blemish on the rest of the city of Bangkok. It's run-down and full of beggars and otherwise poor people waiting for a cheap train to wherever life takes them. The trains themselves are extremely basic: wooden benches and windows that (thankfully) slide open with no regard for safety. The train leaves at 6AM, so the girls grabbed a couple hours of sleep while I stood guard over the backpacks. At 6AM the train arrived, and we were off on our 6 hour ride to Aranyaprathet, a small town on the border between Thailand and Cambodia.

Aranyaprathet is a lawless territory. It is one of the shadiest places I have ever, and (most likely) will ever, visit. The journey we were undertaking is not uncommon, so many tuk-tuk drivers were waiting for us at the train stop. For future reference, a tuk-tuk is like a motorcycle that has been retrofitted to serve as a taxi. They are extremely popular in Thailand and Cambodia, and other places too I'm sure. Anyways, the driver takes us to a tour agency not far from the station. They tell us that they can get us a Cambodian visa for 1200 Baht, which took me by surprise because A) tour agencies can't issue visas and B) I have only heard of people getting them either online through the Cambodian government or at the border. Additionally, that was an exorbitant price to pay for the visa.

So I call the guy on this saying that random tour agencies aren't legally authorized to issue visas, ESPECIALLY when the tour agency isn't even located in the country that it is issuing a visa for! The man gets a little pissed that I called shenanigans, and he angrily takes away the forms we had been filling out. He piles us into the back of a tuk-tuk and we are driven about 10 feet to the building next door.

Lo-and-behold, this building is the Cambodian consulate, which we couldn't see before due to a strategically placed wall covered in fauna. Here, they only charge 1000 baht, and being the consulate, they are indeed authorized to issue visas.

It turns out that the "tour company" was just a bunch of guys dressed in nice clothes scamming people out of an extra 200 baht. They would have the people fill out the necessary forms, and then take their passports and 1200 baht to the consulate next door and purchase the visas for 1000 baht. Now 200 baht is only about 6 dollars, but in Thailand and Cambodia it goes a long way. So we successfully avoid this scam and move on to the border crossing. The border is really shady as well, but it's easy to avoid the shade and remain where the light is if you just don't talk to anybody who isn't a westerner. Our border crossing went fairly smoothly, and we eventually hitched a taxi to Siem Reap, the town just outside of Angkor Wat park.

The road from the border town of Poiphet to Siem Reap is very very bad, in that it is largely unpaved and very bumpy. The reason is because there is only one airline that flies a route between Siem Reap and Bangkok: Bangkok Air. They have been bribing the Cambodian government for years to keep the road unpaved to discourage anybody from taking the land route to Siem Reap. Then they charge huge amounts of money for their tickets. Most flights cost us around $60 or $70 USdollars, but this one cost us about $175. But we were unwilling to waste an entire day taking the exhausting land route back the other way, so we took the hit and flew back to Bangkok a couple days after arriving.



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