Too Many Early Mornings

Today is a rest day, for a lot of reasons. First off, it's hot. Like about 37 degrees hot: central Cambodia is very flat, and that makes being out and around during the day daunting. Secondly, I've been traveling with 3 Germans on a relatively tight time budget,so I've had a series of early morning starts lately, culminating in a 4:45am wake-up to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat. Totally worth it, but the lack of sleep over the last 5 days or so has taken it's toll so today I'm not doing anything that requires me to move much. I'll describe Angkor in my next post, but not today since I've got a 3 day pass and it'll be much easier to do once I'm finished visiting it (I've already taken like about 300 photos on day 1, so it's going to take some time to comb through them). This is just to describe what I've been up to before arriving here.

I mentioned that I've been traveling with 3 Germans,and here they are:

 Left to right: Patrick, Rabea and Nils

Good people, I met them on my way to do a tour at Khao Yai national park, and since we had roughly the same path and itinerary, we teamed up for cheaper transport and good times ensued. Saved me a ton of money too, because taking taxis alone is not cheap. I did 2 tours at the park since the second was nearly free when you booked the first, and among the highlights were putting a scorpion spider and a huge, hairy millipede on my face in a cave (I don't have photos since my camera battery died, but I'm hoping the guy I gave my email address to will step up and send his photos - so far nothing), seeing 2 million bats exit a cave like a swarm of bees and the hawks that preyed on them as they exited, doing some night swimming in a natural spring, getting absolutely drenched and covered in leeches while trekking during a thunderstorm, and seeing some very cool wildlife including gibbons and scorpions (but no elephants, regrettably).

 This is a gibbon, the shot was taken though a scope. Gibbons make crazy noises.

It was a lot of fun and the night of the second tour was capped off by drinking with a group of German girls despite needing to get up at 6am the next morning to catch a bus that didn't exist. It all worked out in the end though, since I drank about 2 litres of water while I packed up my bag at 2am, and then napped the slight hangover off while we waited at the bus station the next morning for the bus that were told would depart at 7 but really departed at 8.

Then things got very, very aggravating. This bus had a sound system that would rival most clubs and it absolutely pounded music from a popular Thai group's concert DvD for the first hour. We asked for it to be turned down, but were ignored. After the concert dvd ended, the world's worst television show came on and made our lives miserable for the remaining 3 hours of the trip. The show is kind of like a variety show (I had seen it before on another bus), with a static cast of entertainers and the most over-the-top, stylized skits and bad contest segments I have ever seen, all punctuated with more sound effects than any kid's show. It was just awful. This particular episode had the cast ''singing'' the same song, with the same beat, for 3 hours through a variety of skits that simply had different lyrics. It was torture, and I was only spared my sanity because I had very good headphones. The other 3 did not, and they were very angry Germans when the bus finally arrived at it's destination. Luckily our next stop after getting to the hostel was a temple located on top of an inactive volcano, which was very cool, and served to mellow us all out as we walked the grounds. A few pictures, more in the album:

The temple is in the Khmer style, so it was a great little primer for Angkor. Based in Angkor, the Khmers ruled a huge area from about 1000BC to 1400ish, and their influence is all over the region. In fact when the Thais finally sacked Angkor (twice) as the empire was falling into ruin, they carted away a massive number of intellectuals, religious officials and artists, so there's a heavy Khmer influence in Thai culture to this day. The temple was far outside of the city and transport wasn't cheap, so this wasn't something I would have been able to afford to do on my own and it awesome to be able to share the cost of hiring the driver with the Germans.

That night we went out to grab a bite to eat and had just a terrible meal. Of the 4 of us, 3 couldn't or wouldn't eat our food. Rabea's curry was waaaaay too spicy (like, someone made a mistake spicy, not just native spicy), Nils ordered fried chicken with ginger and got what looked like chicken kneecaps that were all bone and no meat, and I had a fried fish curry dish, except there was nothing but fish and the fish was nothing but bones. Patrick had tofu stir-fry and it was edible but extremely boring, with no flavour. Just terrible. Luckily that's the first really bad meal I've had and our dinner the next night in Cambodia was excellent, a set of traditional Khmer curries with chicken, pumpkin, potato and carrots. Great stuff.

Now for the really trying part of the journey: the border crossing. Both sides are absolutely full of scams, and we encountered our fair share. From the local bus stop on the Thai side of the border we were taken by tuk-tuk to a building pretending to be a Thai embassy. It was a dead giveaway that as soon as we arrived a group of men came out of the door to help us with our bags and started asking questions about where we were going, etc. The scam here is that they 'arrange' your visa into Cambodia for a fee. We spotted it right away so no harm done, but we had to walk an extra 500m or so with our bags to the border, which was not very pleasant in the heat. Everything else went smoothly on the Thai side except for long lineups, but the Cambodia side is a corruption free for all unofficially sanctioned by both the the local government and the police.

It starts when you reach the visa area. The official fee for the visa is 20$ US and you need to give a photo. The processors though ask for a 100 baht fee in order to 'speed up' the processing. I initially refused to pay and was told I'd have to wait until other visas were processed because there were a lot being done at the moment. I had to laugh at that because there were 5 employees working and 6 of us in the office at the time. Unfortunately for me, the Germans were willing to pay it in order to just get out of there and on to the next leg (after all it's only 3.33$ Canadian), so in the interests of not holding up the entire group I caved. I figured I saved at least five times that much by cab sharing with them, so I owed it to them in a sense. The next scam comes when you get through the paperwork. You are then railroaded toward an area with two choices. Option one is to take a free shuttle bus to a bus station 5 miles out of town where you have no option but to take an overpriced bus to Siem Reap, get dropped off at a bus station that is similarly outside of town and where you have no option but to take an overpriced tuk-tuk to whichever guesthouse has paid the driver: the driver will not take you where you want to go. Option 2 is to take an overpriced cab to Siem Reap. In both cases the prices are set by three cartels that operate a monopoly and rotate days on which they provide the transport.

We took option 3. I had read online that by simply walking about 500m into town you could bypass the area controlled by the monopoly and look for independent drivers that would take you to Siem Reap for much cheaper fares, so that's what we did. It was a struggle even to make it the 500m, being hounded along the way by drivers from the monopoly and sweating buckets in the intense mid-day heat as we dragged out bags down a dirt road. The town on the Cambodian side of the border is called Poipet and it's a very strange place: right over the border are huge, upscale hotels and casinos catering to Thais coming across the border to gamble and hire prostitutes, and within about 200m of that area the town just degrades into a slum, with the monopoly cartels working in the middle. We looked around in vain for a restaurant that we could sit in to gather our strength and lose our tails, finally settling for a fly-filled outdoor 'cafe' that only sold soft drinks from a single fridge. Rabea was literally too scared to go to the bathroom there, and she's a cop who is in no way a squeamish woman. After the sugar and the rest had given us an ounce of strength and our tails from the cartel had wandered off to search for other fares, we continued on until we were approached by a driver offering to take us to Siem Reap for a good price, and we jumped at it. The air conditioned car was bliss after the ordeal and the ride was quite fun too, as we went through a storm that was knocking locals off their motorcycles and giving an impressive lightning show off in the distance. Once into Siem Reap it was all sunshine and roses: he dropped us off right at our hostel, where an air conditioned dorm with a comfortable bed and a nice cold shower with great water pressure was waiting. Traveler bliss.

The next day it was up at 4:45 to make Angkor Wat for sunrise, but I'll save all of that for once I'm done exploring over the next 2 days.