Holiday in Cambodia/One Night in Bangkok - Part 1

are two songs well-known to those in whatever they're calling my generation these days.

Returned late last night from the most frenzied travels I've ever had.
Total travelling time? (including waiting at airports and border crossings and train stations and wandering, either lost or aimlessly): 49 hours.
In 4 days.

~ I took the Seoul subway to the bus to the airport and boarded a Bangkok-bound flight.

~ Arrived at Don Muang (DM means "airport" in Thai, by the way) at around midnight Thai time - that's 2 hrs behind Korean/Japanese time.

~ Caught the very last bus to Khao San where I planned to book a cheap guesthouse and catch up on the sleep I'd lost the week before. Thought, "Maybe Robert's written me - he said he might be in Bangkok on a visa run this weekend, too." Robert's a friend from Busan who's wriggled his way to Siem Reap (a village near the famous Khmer temples of Angkor) after some time in SE Asia and working himself sick in Korea - while growing fatigued of all things Korean - as many of us do.

~ Spotted the 24-hour internet cafe I'd frequented some time before during an all-nighter with Latin Americans and Israelis. It's the cheapest in the area - only 30 baht (75 cents) for 80 minutes.

~ "Aha - a few emails from Robert," I grinned. Then, disappointment. He wasn't able to make it till the following weekend. "I'll see you then in Bangkok!" he'd written with his usual understated cheer.
Damn, I thought. Hmm, I did have four days till I'd have to return to Korea. Looked at the computer clock. It was after 2am. Walked over to the receptionist, who smiled, ready to answer any question in her excellent english. She does it all: books bus and air tours, fixes change machines and computers, and sells Diet Coke, too.
I pointed at the bus brochure for Siem Reap. Did they have any spots available for the 7 o'clock departure that morning? She shook her head: "Must book one day before," she said.
"What if I just show up?" I asked desperately (how often that exciting and exhausting sensation, desperation, runs through travel). She looked up with a quizzical smile. I must've looked mildly deranged: hair sticking out at all angles, deodorant straining in stagnant tropical air, eyes unfocused and bleary.
"Right," I said to myself - mumbling, a sure sign of dementia - and headed back to the internet for more options. Khao San buses to Cambodia are notorious for their inconvenience, anyway: they advertise the trip as a mere twelve-hour journey, when it often takes sixteen or more. Drivers take long breaks to prolong the trip so tourists will stay at an overpriced fleabag of a guesthouse that will pay the drivers commission for each backpacker who stays there. It's not uncommon for a driver to stop at the border, extort extra money for a Cambodian visa, or even refuse to drive to Siem Reap, leaving tourists in the hands of a gang of touts who'd rather spend the afternoon haggling over fares than driving anywhere.

~ Through the Thorn Tree forum, I rediscovered Gordon Sharpless's Tales of Asia, an informative site on SE Asia, focused on Cambodia. He's got a great section on the overland route from Bangkok to Siem Reap and back. I read it for an hour or so, taking notes, drawing maps, noting the many cautionary remarks written by others who'd taken the same route. If it hadn't been for his detailed information, the rowdy hyenas that terrorize Cambodia's lawless tourist trade would've managed to rip me off far more than they actually did.

~ Time to rifle through my wallet. I'd changed 100,000 Korean won (about US$90) in Seoul, and had around 50,000 left to change. Though US dollars are accepted everywhere - and are sometimes preferred over local bills in countries with unstable currency - and euros are gaining acceptance, Korean won are difficult to exchange anywhere in Asia outside of national banks. I'd arrive in Cambodia late Saturday afternoon, and leave early Monday morning, well before any banks would be open.
It was nearly 4am, and I had a bus to catch at 5. I had no idea how I'd change the won necessary to pay for my return to Bangkok, but wrote Robert anyway, gushing over how very thrilled I was to be able to see him the next evening.

~ "I know there are some Korean guesthouses around here," I muttered, and wandered around Banglamphu area for the next hour, silently swearing at the metal shutters of each Korean travel agency/laundromat/guesthouse that had closed for the evening.
"C'mon, Koreans can drink all night long; how can these places be closed?" I moaned. One mainstream guesthouse offered me about half of what the won were worth - so the guys could make $20 on my won at Siam bank the next morning. Frustrated and frantic, I hopped in a cab to the bus station.

~ Missed the 5am bus, and made the 5:30 with two minutes to spare.
The sunrise over a national highway, whether surrounded by rice fields or mountains, was rarely crystalline as those I'd glimpsed from the windows of SE Asian sleeper trains. I don't know why - perhaps it was the monotony of asphalt under rubber tires compared with the rocking into somnolence by a decrepit train car.

~ We arrived at Aranyaprathet, the town nearest Thailand's side of the border, and I hailed the first moto whose driver spoke some english. He drove me to Cambodia's border town, Poipet, for 50 baht. Though I could've bargained with the guy over the extra 10 baht he charged me, I felt it petty to haggle over 25 cents when I only had a B50 bill anyway.
It was an easy 6km ride to the border, where smooth-talking Thai hustlers degenerated into Cambodian chaos.

~ Poipet was just as it'd been when I'd last seen it: a dusty no-man's land filled with rickety wooden carts, some piled impossibly high with bulging white sacks, often pulled by undersized children. Land mine victims and able-bodied beggars, many holding newborns, reclined in rare patches of shade as a respite from relentless noontime sun.
Men offered me taxi rides to Siem Reap, though I hadn't even entered their country yet. I walked past them. One said, eyeing my small piece of soft luggage: "You been here before, right?" I nodded, and fewer of them approached me. Men followed me at immigration and hungrily offered to help me fill out visa paperwork for a fee. I ignored them.

~ After a brief wait for my visa, I was ushered back to the immigration patio by a wizened official in a brown uniform that looked nearly as old as he was. He handed me a yellow SARS information card.
"Twenty baht," he said, sotto voce. I'd been warned of this scam by the website. Just as quietly, I said, "I don't see why I have to pay for a card..." and he waved me off, glancing around to see if others had noticed.

~ I walked past a gaggle of motorcycles and every helmeted driver waved for my attention. One pointed to his "friend" nearest to me. "How much to take me to the pickup trucks down that road?" I asked the moto driver. He apparently didn't speak english, so his friend - another tout - called out, "Ten baht." That was the going rate, so I climbed on, one bag slung on each side of my back, hands resting on my thighs for balance, and never anywhere near the driver. Thankfully, that's how one rides with a stranger of the opposite sex in a socially conservative country - even if it teems with rogues, more of whom possess weapons than I care to imagine. Then again, where I come from, you learn to forget how many guns may be passing through your town, too.

~ There are two transport options to the Angkor temples: the first involves dodging the taxi mafia to negotiate directly with the driver, though that's nearly impossible. The second is to take a longer, two-part route, in cramped, rattling pickup trucks. I'd decided to take a pickup to Siem Reap (SR), and hopefully a taxi when I returned to the border in a few days.
After a moment I noticed the tout was just behind us on another mororbike. As I climbed off, he shouted, "You need pickup where? Siem Reap? Sisophon?" I knew not to arrange a ride with him all the way to SR, as he would then dictate the price, truck, and driver for my trip from Sisophon to SR. I might then have to wait an hour or two in Sisophon before the driver found enough passengers to make the journey worthwhile for his wallet.
As it was, I might as well have booked the entire trip at once, for all the waiting around we did later in the day.

~ "Outside or inside?" the hustler demanded. I looked at the nearest truck, fitted with two benches for passengers and produce and anything else that needed transporting over rutted roads. Unlike Thai pickups, the Cambodian version had no shelter from blistering sun. I'd have a patchy permanent blush for weeks if I sat outside. Though the BF might've found that charming - after quelling his worries over my increased probability of getting skin cancer - I remembered the forehead-peeling experience from Angkor last year, so asked for a seat inside the cab.
"How much?" I wondered - a mantra for tourists in the third world and beyond. The tout put his arm around a mustachioed driver and said, "For inside? Much more expensive. You foreigner, need front seat, that's two seats." Typically drivers squeeze two people into the front seat built for one person - that's how one seat makes two, according to the driver - there's some black market arithmetic for you.
"See? You bigger." He pointed somewhere in the direction of my rear end. (Though I'm a US size 7, I didn't argue that I've got the frame of your average Cambodian male who eats two meals a day.) "Seven dollars," he said, a ridiculous amount. I turned away and walked down the road, searching for another truck.
He ran after me, calling out that there were no more trucks, these were the only ones available, they were ready to leave straight away. Then he lowered the price to the more reasonable B200 for "two" inside seats.
I relented, and climbed in the truck. This displaced a Khmer woman who glared at me from the backseat until she was distracted by the piercing ring of her cell phone, and proceeded to shout three-quarters of a conversation to her caller for much of the trip.

~ I sighed and closed my eyes after securing luggage under my knees, relieved to be sitting in front of vents that blasted chill air up my nose and eyelashes. Then I heard more english in my direction.
"Miss? Tip now, miss?" The tout was miffed that I'd refused to pay the driver up front so he could get his cut right away. "No," I said, smiling as a dutiful midwesterner should when refusing a ridiculous request, and looked away. "Please, miss," he said, holding out his hand. "I must pay moto to drive me back to the border."
"I didn't ask you to follow me here," I said, "but thanks for coming along." He gave up and closed the door.

The BF finally consented

to having our picture online.



Here we are recently in a Seoul park (can't of course remember the name) on a gorgeous autumn afternoon. We were both scruffy and tousled that day. He's got his usual grin, and I'm smirking at the camera, to forget how much I can't stand being in front of it.

It seems I've accidentally put the photo on this PC's wallpaper, so if you're in Itaewon and see the two of us in near life-size duplication, well, you've got the best seat in the ever-smoky Neo PC 방.

It grows cooler now, and the summery clothes I brought back to Korea with me are doing NOTHing these days but letting in chill breezes. A friend may bring some clothes from Busan in a week or two, so I won't be shivering much longer.

Happy fall to all.