Right now Moe and I are in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, whichever you prefer. We just spent 3 days in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a touristy but nice place.
All 3 days we hired the same tuk tuk driver to take us around to the temples. You can’t walk more than 5 seconds without a tuk tuk driver hassling you but Traa asked us the first day so we went with him. We ended up making friends with him and having him for the other 2 days as well. The first day cost 10 dollars. 10 dollars for him to drive us around and wait for us all day! That’s ridiculous! The average income for a Cambodian is around 50 dollars a month. The 3 day entrance fee for the temples cost us 40 dollars. Cambodia is even more poor than Laos, which is even more poor than Thailand, which is quite poverty ridden to begin with.
We don’t have much time left in Southeast Asia though, as we have to return to Tokyo on the 28th, but we’re about to take a 30 hour, 2 night, 1 day train to Hanoi in an hour. We’ll see things in Northern Vietnam for about a week before we’ll fly back to Bangkok and then spend the rest of our time at the Thai island called Koh Chang. I’ve heard it’s “the spot” from a lot of other backpackers so I’m pretty excited about it. In 5 years it’ll be overcome by hotels and tourism like many of the other islands in Thailand right now and people will go elsewhere.
Now to fill in some details…
Picking up Moe went smoothly and we left early the next morning on a bus to the Cambodian/Thailand border. The roads in Thailand are in impressively good condition, especially after you’ve ridden a bus in Laos, but the road from the border to Siem Reap is notorious amongst backpackers and I’ve read/heard many things about it so I was a bit apprehensive. I read a lot about scams involving buses taking 10 hours (it should be 4-5) so that you get into the city in the middle of the night and then they force you to stay at their hotel after you’re exhausted from the miserable day’s ride. The night before we left I was informed by some nice people at our guesthouse that it’s better to take a bus to the border and then a taxi from then on, but now that the taxi company is controlled by the mafia and they’re charging twice as much and bullying/following people around at the border to make sure they don’t find a cheaper route. Well, whatever, we went for it and it ended up being way easier than expected. I’d read on the internet the prices that everything should be so when we were there we were only overcharged as little as possible.
The taxi ride was pretty fantastic. It took a little over 3 hours like they said, but by the way this guy was driving I thought we’d be there in 2. I’ve never seen anything like it. The road is nonexistant, there’s no pavement or anything, it’s just dirt and rocks and potholes and dust. When I say “taxi” I mean a Toyota Camry that should be driving wayyyyyyyyyy wayyyyy slower than our driver was going. He would swerve across the road to avoid huge potholes that would have just destroyed his car had he hit them. We never got passed once, but we passed a million and a half things: buses, tons of motobikes, other taxis, trucks, bikes, everything. He would honk 5 or 6 times while passing, so essentially he was honking the entire way. There were many times where I thought we were either about to kill somebody or ourselves. Again, it was a pretty fantastic ride.
Siem Reap is a touristy town. Everything there is twice as much as Thailand, Laos, or other parts of Cambodia although twice as much is still cheap. The town was dumpy like every other city I’ve seen, so by itself it’s not much to look at but the Cambodian people are definitely the best part. Always joking, always smiling, always fun. It’s interesting the contrast between Cambodia, where people are extremely poor yet seem to make the most of what they do have, to consumer cultures like Japan where comparitively I’m poor yet the suicide rate is one of the highest in the world.
Anyways, it’s time to physically and mentally prepare myself for the 30 hour train ride to Hanoi after riding in a bus for 13 hours today.
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