Bird’s Nest Bevarage – 25% bird’s nest

In Bangkok the girls jetted off home and i was left on my lonesome. My one month visa was running out and so on the spur of a (mad) moment i decided to visit Siam Reap for a week instead of simply joining a visa run that takes no more than half a day – a rather stupid decision considering i was planning to visit Cambodia in five or six weeks.

So, the journey from BK to Siam Reap. They warn you in the ‘bible’ (SE Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet guide) that the trip is an endurance test of epic proportions. I brushed off any suggestions of difficulty, after all I was at this stage a veteran traveller of nearly half a year. Little did i know.

Woke at seven (an endurance in itself) and caught the first bus. Five hours later we stopped off at a small border town where our visas were organised for the princely sum of thirty dollars – ten more than at the border. “Oh it’s much quicker and smoother this way” they said as we all sat for half an hour in a restaurant waiting (and ordering food to pass the time – the real reason for stopping!) I later met a backpacker who breezed through the visa office at the border within 2 minutes. Money-making would be a theme of the journey.

Afterwards we finally reached the border. Land borders are fascinating places to me for the simple reason that i come from a postmodern EU where state borders lack their former importance. Moreover loud voices in various strands of academia, supported by the mainstream media have fostered the view that borders are an increasingly rare breed; relics from a past world-order. This one seemed seemed alive and well; Eurocentric theorising about the erosion of borders in the face of economic, political and cultural global flows seemed rather vacuous from this vantage point. This is not an argument that borders are impermeable containers of power, population, money or ideas; they never have been. A nation state ontology of world politics is largely meta-geographical mythmaking and globalization is no new phenomenon. Multi-dimensional, interconnecting flows have long characterised the international.

(Sorry for the world politics tangent, but a travel-log is so much better when its not just “i went here, then there, then here” – i thought i should share my experiences and feelings as i went and so world politics naturally makes a showing).

However, as i crossed the line demarcating Thailand from Cambodia certain changes were apparent immediately suggesting borders are more than arbitrary lines in the dirt. Cars were replaced by carts; fruit and veg, wood abd building material, even people were all pulled by women. Kids of no more than six or seven, babies strapped to their backs or slung over their shoulders appproached me looking dirty and bedraggled with their arms held out and whinning softly in the hope my heart would melt and my wallet would open.

Just across the border i saw three kids lounging in a patch of woods. They should have been at school, playing football or amusing themselves but instead they sat there scowls on their faces looking much older than their years suggested, as if their childhood had been robbed.

But not to paint too grim a picture – moments later a boy plucked a ball out of the river, though i must admit the banks were masked by a thick layer of plastic bottles, waste paper and other household rubbish. Still i had been warned the border town, called Poipet was a cesspit.

It was certainly a change from Thailand. There are no paved roads; the street to the bus station consisted of thick mud interspersed with lake-sized puddles. The shops and houses are all wooden shacks with tin roofs and flourishes of blue or off-white plastic sheeting. And the bus stop? – an unfinished brick building with metal pylons protruding from the walls and ceilings.

Whilst waiting for our second bus i was asked by a tour operator if i wanted to change any money. So began my journey on the back of a moped with my butt and teeth firmly clenched. The roads and traffic in Cambodia are a sight in themselves. Students of Chaos Theory should without doubt spend a term in this country observing the sheer volume of cars, carts, bikes and cycles choking the small streets. How anyone reaches their destination is beyond me and yet they all weave effortlessly in and out of each other. I felt i was watching a grubby, motorised dance. People regularly stop in the middle of the road, and like a stream of water the people behind part and join up on the other side. Some hurtle down the wrong side of the street, others cut people up without warning, and still more swerve dangerously close to pedestrians, animals and various other blockages.

From there we caught our last bus, a medium sized minibus. By the time i got on all the seats were taken so i had to endure a pull out chair in the aisle designed for children, short people or Umpa Lumpa’s. No chance to even lean back, I had to sit dead straight which for the initial half hour was fine but soon grew tiresome after that.

As the Lonely Planet claims, the organisers try and draw this journey out as much as possible.

For the rest of this post please go HERE.

Tags: Asia, Bangkok, Bus, Scam, Siam Reap, Travel

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 11:17 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.