the whole of sunday was spent travelling between bangkok and siem reap. good god!
left khaosarn at 8:30am. The bus was a huge one..so it was pretty comfortable. and it cost only 300 baths. Reached the border town of aranyaphrathet at 3pm. Got down...took another bus to the border and did the whole immigration thing. The Cambodian part of the immigration office was a short walk away from the Thai's. The moment u stepped unto cambodian soil, you can feel the stark difference between the standard of living in Thailand and Cambodia. Poverty is rampant. It looked like a country just fresh out of war! ok a little exaggerated...but not much.
a statue of Vishnu stood guard in the center of the roundabout right beside the immigration offce. The sky was already dark when i had my passport stamped. it's the rainy season. In no time at all, the heavy afternoon downpour started. mother of god! children playing around in the middle of the flooded street...kicking empty bottles and splashing each other silly haha.. they looked really cute!.
A few other backpackers were also stranded outside the humble immigration office. We waited for probably an hour before the bus which were to take us to the bus station arrived. We were already soaking wet by then haha. i scambled to put all the electronic stuff and important documents into the huge plastic bag i brought with me. we hade to wade through this flooded street to get to the bus...brown colored water with shit Unidentified Floating Objects bobbing around. haha. i have a small cut on my right foot so i quickly applied some antiseptic cream for not wanting the whole leg to rot and fall off :p u just have to be extra careful when u're backpacking.
bus took 5 minutes to reach the main bus station. The driver wittily announced that we've reached the 'boat' station when we pulled into this totally flooded humble bus station. Waited for another hour there before the bus for Siem Reap arrived. The border town of PoiPet was...hmm...poor. unfinished buildings everwhere...run down wooden stalls, flooded streets, and most of the ppl were poorly dressed...they looked weary and dirty. Life is undeniably difficult for them.
Soaked to the bones despite having brought my windbraker i prayed that i wont fall sick or anything. It's too darn early for that. it's ony the 3rd day!.
The humble bus for Siem Reap was well....a really humble one. dirty and dusty and old. The rain has already stopped when we left the bus station. So it was fresh air coming in through the window. The scenes were heartbraking. poverty is the only word i can find to describe everything.
The road to siem reap must be the bumpiest road in the whole wide world and i'm not even exaggerating. And the driver told us that it was already a whole lot better compared to a couple of years ago! It was sooo bumpy i couldnt even imagine how the beat-up bus could have made it all the way to Siem Reap. At the end of it i felt like all my internal organs had been reorganized, with my kidney somwhere near where my heart should be, and my heart ..hmpp..somwhere else! the distance between PoiPet and SiemReap is only 120km but the journey took more than 5 hours. When nite falls, you can't see a darn thing on each side of the road. only reflections of flooded paddy fields and flooded street. The wooden huts along the road looked dark and abandoned. Electricity is ovbiously scarce. Only a few houses have it and they're far between.
Muddied, dirty and smelly, we stopped for dinner at this one restaurant along the road. Obviously built to cater for passing busses. A plate of rice cost 6000Riel (bout rm6) ! Freaking expensive in this part of the country! Chatted with a backpacker from Japan and another from San Francisco. Totally interesteing individuals. The Japanese lady was a cambodian dance instructor who studied traditional cambodian dance in Pnom Penh. She can bend her fingers backwards until they touch her wrist!, one of the requirements for cambodian dance apparently.
The San Franciscan was a summer tutor at Stanford. Interesting in the fact that her idol was Noam Chomsky, the hardcore anti american policy advocate. She has travelled extensively and it's interesting to hear her stories.
Reached Siem Reap at about 10pm. tired and extremely jaded i just settled for the guesthouse the bus dropped us at (yeah...i fell for the khaosarn scam after all!) . It's USD 4 a nite. which is still expensive in this town. But the rooms are clean, with a tv, and hot shower!! Who on earth can resist all that after that horrifying (but fun) bus ride from PP to SR, not me oh no sir.
Chatted a little bit more outside with the backpackers before going to bed at about 1am.
Monday today. Rented a bike (bicycle) for USD 1 for the day (renting motorbikes to foreigners is illegal in SR) and i'm off exploring SR town. It's a pretty small town but the streets are crazy packed with bicycles and motorbikes and cars and red dust :p
it's a mission trying to stay alive on a bicycle on the streets of SR. Road rules are almost non-existant. Ppl just zoom past u from the left and right like nobody's business. After a few turns however, yours sincerely have blended in quite well :) the bicyle they gave me had this bell (horn?) and i wasted no time ringing away like crazy along the busy road haha. obviously i stuck out like a sore thumb because of my superb bicycle-riding skills, scaring away little kids and old ppl alike ;p . Judging from the way i handled the turns I'm sure at least more than 5 members of the public would have thought that i'm on a crazy bike suicide mission. oh..The stupid chain came off once and i had to squat in the blistering sun to fix the darn thing. but it's all fun! haha part of the experience and i gladly took everything in.
The roads are awfully dusty. After only a few hours on the streets i'm already feeling like i have put on a thick reddish foundation on my face haha. And my poor poor lungs....all the dust
visited a few modern Wats in SR (modern as compared to angkor wat of course). But they're incredibly low-profile and humble. Nothing exaggerating or grand like Thai Wats. they just exude humility and simplicity in the best sense.
Cambodian ppl are beautiful. dark skinned and rough features, and they're extremely resilient. You can just see it in them. and they're easy to smile too which is really awesome.
i gotta go explore more. Going to angkor wat today at 4:30pm. u get a free sunset after 4:30pm because the ticket's valid for the next day.
can't wait!
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