Cambodia to Bangkok

I caught the $US12 bus from Siem Reap to Bangkok. The lonely Planet, and most travellers had dissed the trip, saying its rough bumpy and time consuming. Well in my rush to meet Julia in Bangkok it was pretty much my only option. It was a mini bus of about 15 frarang, all fairly cool with a good international mix. The bus trip started off well, for about the first 5 minutes until we left Siem Reap. I had originally though that the crappy bus ride would entail a huge mountain range, but no. It's all very flat, apart from the fucking monstrous pot holes scattered intermittently through out the road. It was an interesting zig zag path weaving between the trenches. I found the best technique was to stick my sleeping bag under my arse and loosely brace my self so when we hit a bump, and every one bounced I just managed to land on something soft. Apart from a few elbows hitting the window sill and one or two miss calculations, my butt hit the sleeping bag nearly every time. It was going fairly well for the first 6 or so hours, until a fairly lage ditch caused the suspension to bottom out and with a bit of a crunch it broke. We continued on, but the tire was hitting the wheel arch. We pulled to the side and piled out on to the dirt trip, a few local kids tending the fields wandered over and inquisitively stood at a distance. They gazed at the dozen funny looking white people climb under a bus ask questions then start a game of hacky sack. The quite funny Russian born Canadian had the right idea, and with in a few minutes had her thumb out at the Ute loads of confused Cambodians.

Soon, a plan was hatched, we hitch to the next major town where they will organise a different way to get us to the Thai border. I threw my bag on to the roof of a ute and climbed into the back as 3 others did the same, unluckily the ute had at least 20 Cambodians in it already. So say it was squishy was an understatement at least sardines in a can have olive oil or tomato sauce to slosh around in a bit. It all started to get pretty uncomfortable including a near panic attack from the British girl who was positioned precariously on the edge rail, with her cousin sitting on her lap and fuck all to hang onto. I think the highlight of the trip was me realising I had a bunch of postcards in my bag that I had scored in Phenom Pehn, I caused a fair bit of excitement was I passed them around, translating the English descriptions and locations of kids on buffalos waterfalls and street scenes. We pulled over to drop some one off ( or pick some one up if that was even possible ) as a larger truck cruised past with plenty of room, I quickly jumped shit and jumped onto the back of the other truck. I quickly made friends with the people on the back. My Khmer vocabulary is zero, and their English was about the same but with a few place names, allot of pointing and some strange facial expression my new circle of friends included the guy with aviators, the weird guy with the freaked out crazy man laugh, the guy who's bag I accidentally trod on, the first Asian I've seen with a full face beard and one of my favourites, the middle aged lady with a wicked cackling hoot of a laugh. She would say something in Khmer (usually including farang) point at me and virtually piss her pants. She had a giant big full face grin and sound effects any Sitcom sound engineer would pay top dollar for. When she made the connection with the bearded Asian and my self she nearly fell off the back of the truck.

After about a while we arrived at the next town, I met up with the other tourists, and my bags that I had left on the first ute. We were told to put all our bags onto a ute, then climbed ontop of our bags for the rest of the journey.

We made it to the Thai border but it did seem the driver felt the need to somehow make up the 2 hours we had been delayed during the course of the hour long journey. It was good to be back in Thailand, we waited around a bit got some food changed some cash, got hassled by a crap load of beggars then jumped into what seemed like excessive opulence, not just being inside, but air-conditioned, not just having a seat, but it being soft and reclinable. I must have been in such shock that a few hours later when I got off the bus in Bangkok I fucking left my phone in the seat pocket in front of me. Bringing the tally to a camera and a phone in about a week, after 3 months of a fairly unblemished record I was fairly pissed off. Luckily I had backed up my stuff just a few days before so I should have a fairly easy restoration of phone numbers etc.