Sunday 30th March 2008

After a nice early start to the morning, we said our goodbyes to the lovely staff at our guest house and then, at 8am, walked the short distance through town to the beach. The guy we'd bought our tickets from arrived shortly afterwards and five of us were soon herded in a tiny boat - that was no wider than a canoe... backpacks and all. We safely made it to the other side where we had to wait for nearly an hour for our bus.

Even though we were the first at the 'bus station', our bus was the last to leave and left and sometime near 10am. The drive to the border wasn't too bad, although we did notice that all the other buses were going to one check-point and we were going to another. We were dropped off at the side of the road and had to go through Laos immigration to 'check out'. The building we had to queue outside of was no bigger than a shed from B&Q - it was tiny, and the guy's there were really grumpy. We paid our $2 Departure Tax (read: back pocket tax) and were ushered into no-mans land, between Laos and Cambodia. We walked for about 150 meters to the other immigration building, where we had to apply for visas and pay another $2, this time for Entry Tax (once again, read: back pocket tax). All in all, crossing over the border was a pretty painless experience, but MUCH WORSE was to follow. About 30 of us were shown to our Cambodian transport, which happened to be the oldest, hottest and smelliest bus in existence. We were told to get on the bus immediately and then watched as the driver sat outside (in the cool) and had a drink.

It was our original plan to stop in a place called Kratie, which is about 4 hours South of the border but, when we got there, we were told that there are no cash points in the whole city. In fact, the only cities that do have them are Phnom Penh and Siam Reap. With only $13US and about 500 Thai Baht in our pockets, things weren't looking good, so we changed our minds and somehow managed to convince our driver to let us stay on the bus to Phnom Penh... for a fee of course.

The landscape in Cambodia was (not surprisingly) a mix of those in Vietnam and Laos. Like Laos there seemed to be more normal fields than rice ones but, like Vietnam there seemed to be more trees - unlike Laos which seemed quite flat. The drive to Phnom Penh was... painful. The roads here are unbelievable - they must be the most uneven, inconsistent and dangerous roads in the world. If we had been on a plane and we'd been bouncing around as much then I would've got into the emergency brace position - it was madness!

We eventually arrived at just before 10pm tonight after a whole day on the road. We were dropped off and the driver, who spoke no English, just drove off - with no explanation as to where we were or anything. We were surrounded by guest house touts and were soon on our way to a bed for the night. We decided to go with this young guy from Number 10 Guest House, which he said was great... it wasn't! We had a really grotty little room, but after the journey we'd had we didn't care - it had a bed (which was sort of clean). We dumped our bags and then went to chill out in the bar for an hour or so and laugh about the day we'd had...

WOW! So this is Cambodia... Nice Roads!