As part of all modern day travel, we inform us about all the choices, things to do, dangers and so on via travel blogs, TripAdvisor, WikiTravel and God only knows what else.
Sometimes this can be a good thing, mostly it can add layers of complexity to your journey. I guess this has best been illustrated by Michael Macintyre in this YouTube clip, when he talks about TripAdvisor (yes I am a reviewer on TA too).
Sometimes the stuff you read just get you hyped up beyond belief, meaning that you can not make a controlled judgement anymore. Or stuff is just plain right wrong. We had a couple of both on our journey and some of them got me into a wee bit of trouble too...
The transit from Bangkok to the Cambodian border was described by (in)numerous blogs as something really horrible. It probably is, when you try to do this on 5€ a nose. If you -however- book an entire cab/minibus yourself, it will set you back about 90-100€, but as the minibus holds 6-7 people, I leave it to your creativity on how much this will actually cost you on a per person basis. We used the services of a chap called Sompoach, Cell phone number +66 81 901 7292. And the ride could not been better. OK I first met him under rather dodgy looking circumstances in Bangkok near the Victory Monument for the down payment. But in hindsight the trip could not have been better. Smooth, stopped whenever we wanted to. Asked us whether we wanted to go to the market in Aranyprathet (no thank you) and carried straight to the border. he literally stopped 50m from the Thai emigration post. He even warned us from the porters 'Not nice people'
OK the small journey between the Thai post and the Cambodian post in Poipet, where you walk through 300m of No Man's Land with casinos and dodgy creatures is not my most memorable stroll. But just say No to anyone NOT in a uniform and you will be fine. If you have an e-visa got straight to Immigration but DO NOT forget to get one of the immigration card distributed by the officials (they are free). If you do not have a visa, go to the VOA booth WITH two passport photos and 20$ and then proceed as above. You will be fine.
Afterwards they will try to usher you to the free bus that takes you to some dusty outpost of Poipet from where the busses to Siem Reap leave (9$ pp) or the official taxis (48$ per taxi or 12$ pp). Now some may argue that this is rip off and all this. Fact of the matter is that some people we met along the route did not go to the terminal but into Poipet and negotiated hard (really hard) and paid 10$ pp in some cab, sharing it with locals.
Quite frankly, you are halfway around the world in a country where people die of hunger and you start being stingy on what - 3$ ???
The ride between Poipet and Siem Reap is nearly 160 km and takes 2.5 hours. Even in Cambodia petrol prices are linked to on how the Crude Oil prices are doing.
So just take a bus or a cab (or organize your own transportation for marginally less), but whatever way you choose is fine. There is no mafia and dodgy people. Just people doing their job. Maybe they work for some corrupt person, maybe they don't, but they do work to feed their family. So respect them. I didn't really, as I was quite hyped up by all this crap, so I shouted at random at people. And they do not like this. At all.
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment