Today's trip from Siem Reap was long. Very long. We woke up at 6:00 for a 7:00 taxi to the border. About 20km outside of town, the paved road abruptly ends and becomes a dirt path strewn with small stones and full of meter-wide potholes. It continues like this for about 2 hours before resuming 'road' status for a few kilometers and then slowly transferring to 'former road' for the last hour and a half.
At one point, we came upon a long row of parked trucks. 'This is interesting,' we thought. Upon reaching the front of the line, we realized why. 'Bridge broken,' our driver informed us. Some trucks were trying to detour around the small metal-plank bridge, but got stuck in door-deep mud.
After a few minutes of thinking we were never going to get across, though, some people standing on the bridge fixed a make-shift track for cars to go over, and we sped across and on. We arrived at the border a little after 11.
We got through the border procedures on both sides relatively hassle-free - just the usual surprise on the part of the Cambodian official on seeing an Uzbekistan passport for the first time. (He kept reexamining the passport cover, trying to make out the name of the country, I guess.) The Cambodian border town of Poipet is a dusty market town, with a few travel agents selling bus tickets and some roadside stands selling fruit. But right after passport control on the way to Thailand are several enormous luxury casinos. These towering edifices are totally incongruous in the surroundings - dirt roads, rice fields, and two aluminum shack border posts. Apparently, the Cambodians built these to attract gamblers from Thailand, where the pastime is illegal.
From the Thai side of the border, we took a tuk-tuk to the bus station and then got on a bus for Bangkok - supposedly a 4-hour trip, but we apparently got the milk run, which stopped everywhere, and arrived into Bangkok's standstill traffic only at 5:30 in the afternoon. We thought we'd get a quick taxi to our hotel - strategically located right on the 'skytrain' line, a lesson from April's visit to Bangkok when we spent half our time in traffic. This took another hour...crawling in the gridlock right under the skytrain tracks. We have no Lonely Planet for Bangkok, so I didn't know our orientation when we arrived, but once in the traffic, we had no choice but to ride it out, despite the temptation to get out and just get on the train.
We'll be in Bangkok two days before getting on a 20-hour train ride to the border with Malaysia, from where we'll move on to the Perhentian islands.
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