One night in the big dirty
Trip Start
Feb 19, 2009
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Trip End
Aug 02, 2009
Wöfficials finally arrived after a horribly long overnight bus ride. Pretty nice luxury bus though..... so not too bad. They dropped us off in a random side street somewhere near Koa San road (Backpacker Mecca of BKK) at 6am. So we walked towards that area is search of a cheap room..... found one on Rambuttri street..... $300 baht.... not exactly value for money though. It was dark..... dirty... no window to the outside, should have had hot water shower but it didn't work...... and it was just all around pretty nasty. Value for money is hard to find in the big city I guess. We slept for a while then explored the area a bit.... saw all the cool stuff that we wanted to buy.... but would wait to buy until we were back again. That night we got a tuk tuk down town and watched the new Terminator movie.... not bad....and they even had popcorn!!! I like this city! The next morning we started our epic journey to Cambodia. I had done a fair bit of research on line about this border crossing and felt like we were ready to head off any of the scams that might come our way. Ha. Ha. Not even close. We started our journey by taxi..... the first taxi we talked to said it would be $200 baht to the bus station, I asked him if he used his meter... and he said no... so we said no thanks (Scam!), we found another taxi that did use his meter and made our way to the South Bus Terminal.... for $100 baht and bought tickets on a bus leaving shortly for the Cambodian Border. There were three other foreigners on the bus with us...who we would end up getting to know quite well! I think the adventure and scams brought us closer together. We got to the border and once they determined yet again that we did not have Swine Flu we headed over the building where you purchase the Cambodian Visa. This visa costs $20 American and the officials are notoriously corrupt.....so there are many scams to watch out for. Right away one office says to me while I am filling out the form that it will cost me $20 plus $1000 thai baht which he called an express visa fee (I call this the Cambodian border official scam!). I told him right away that I knew he was scamming me and there was absolutely no way I would be paying any extra fees. The other couple there caught on right away too and refused to pay. There was a single guy we met on the bus too... fresh off the plane in BKK and he would have gone ahead and paid the $1000 baht had we not all told him not too. So the öfficals" as they like to call themselves decided to bargain... first down to $200 baht, then $100 baht. We refused and argued for a good 45 minutes, with no headway. No they had nothing official to show us that we had to pay this extra fee. no they would not give us their names or ID numbers etc etc. Whenever we tried to reason with them they would just shut the window on us. At the end of the day paying $100 baht is not a big deal, but it is the principle of it.....rahhh. Makes me angry just thinking about it again. So we pay off the officials, check our visas over to make sure they are all as they should be... and huff it across with our bags to Cambodia. Not a good first impression of the country to be sure. From there we get on a shuttle to the bus station. The five of us from the original bus decide to stick together and take another bus on to Siem Reap. Buses to Siem Reap are notorious for scams... and sure enough, three hours later we found ourselves right in the middle of another one. The bus driver says he is not allowed to drive into the city (which is a load of crap). He drops us off just outside the city where there is a group of tuk tuks who will only take us to the guest house that they get commission from. Again.... we argue for what seems like way to long and they finally understand that they won't be taking us to their guest house and they might as well make a dollar off us by taking us down town. We then are dropped of at the side of the road and we wander for a good hour trying to find somewhere suitable to stay. We find a place for $10 per night.... not bad... big clean room with a fan and tv. We end up moving the next day to a place for $9 per night, fan, tv and a pool! .... Will fill you in on the glories of Siem Reap asap.
