Cambodia

A hot steaming crowed 6 hour train transferred us from Bangkok to the border town of Aranya Prathet (where toddler peed by my feet and bag) and a short sawngthaew ride (a Thai cross between a pick-up truck and a tuk-tuk) brought us to emigration. There were no problems on the Thai side leaving, but on applying for our visa to enter into Cambodia the corrupt passport officials were basically demanding a bride. They were trying to charge the equivalent of nearly $30 for the $20 visa; excusing it as an ‘express fee’ - at the border where they issue visas on arrival. If we wanted to pay $20 they said we would have to wait four days for our visa. They are of course lying, but the worst part is that it’s the passport official, the highest authority in the office who was sanctioning this. I know it’s ‘only’ $10, but it’s the principle. A similar situation occurred in Bangkok when we were applying for our Vietnam visas:

A travel agent quoted us $43 for four day processing so we went directly to the Vietnam embassy ourselves. The offices were void of a pricelist and the woman tried to charge us $52 with a processing time of 5 days; any sooner and we’d have to pay $60!! She refused to provide written proof of these prices and basically told us to get out- and that’s the short version. This left a bad impression of the Vietnamese and after dealing with so much corruption in India we didn’t feel like visiting Vietnam anymore. We discovered on line that the cheapest and quickest way to get our visas was in Cambodia and we figured if we couldn’t get them there it was fate not to go.


Thus when we got to these Cambodian officials rigging the price we were pretty peed off. Mal was saying that if this was what the standard of hospitality was like in Cambodia he didn’t feel like entering there either. Eventually we convinced the officials that we had no Thai bhat only dollars where they settled on charging us $25 each. Apparently they are notorious at that border crossing for screwing the tourists. A bad first impression of the country that happily changed the longer we stayed.



No mans land between Thailand and Cambodia was a little strange, lots of casinos and resorts. I guess this is where you go for gambling if you’re Thai or Khmer (Cambodians are known as Khmer). Once we finally entered Cambodia it was a little strange, there was no information and the taxis and busses were in league with the touts. Thankfully we struck luck with a local taxi from Siam Reap who had just made a drop and agreed to take us for half the rate the touts were offering- score! Once we almost arrived in Siam Reap we were deposited just outside the town where touts were waiting to take us to guesthouses via bikes. We were eventually deposited outside a hotel, managed to get rid of the tout and found a nice guesthouse for $22 for 4 days. Cambodia was looking good to us again.