Today was a long travel day for us, as we were making our way from Pattaya to Siem Reap. We woke up early and hopped on a shared taxi to the airport.
There is a yellow bus company that provides transportation for the first half of the trip. Leaving from the North Pattaya Bus Terminal, you want to find the ticket window headed to Mukdahan. There are several times you can leave, with the early busses leaving all morning until 9, and the late busses starting at 5:30. You must take the early bus if you want to cross the border (without waiting forever) since the border buildings close around 6 or 7.
We met Jo from France on the bus ride to Aranyaprathet (Thailand city near the border). He’d been traveling for about 10 months previously, and it was pretty cool chatting with him, even though a good portion of his adventures had been in North America. It ended up being a nice coincidence because we were able to watch each other’s backs for the rest of the trip.
It’s hard to tell when the bus reaches Aranyaprathet. The bus stop is literally a side of the road next to some shops, and we were all confused when the bus driver told us it was our stop. Luckily there was a lady who spoke both Thai and English, and she yelled at the driver for a bit before confirming that this was the correct place to get off.
The moment we got off, a driver approached us, asking to take us to the border and naming his price as 1000 baht per person. Yea..no. That didn’t happen. We walked for about 2 minutes, caught a tuk tuk, and headed out. From the bus stop to the border, it’s a straight shot down one dusty and hot road.
Our driver dropped us off behind a building next to the border, where we saw travelers walking into a building. We were immediately suspicious when people started asking us where we were from, and if we needed visas. I guess the travelers inside were getting visas, but we told them we were from America, and no we didn’t need visas. It took the longest time for them to stop asking us if we needed to get our visas done, but we ended up just walking away and down to the border. Every site that we’ve researched has said that there is no need to get a visa before crossing. (Woo, the beginning of a large number of scams that people tried pulling on us for this trip)
At the border, there’s signs that point you through immigration for foreigners to exit Thailand. We got our stamps and headed out. Here’s where it gets a little bit confusing. First, we had to get our visas. The building for this is right next to the gate with the Angkor replica on top. We went in, filled out a form, whipped out a photo and $20 (plus 100 baht processing fee?) and got our visas.
From here, you keep going down the road on the right hand side and pass a couple of buildings and casinos. You have to go into the immigration/arrival to Cambodia building, fill out another form, and get your official stamp in (And keep that departure card! They staple it in for you though). From there, you keep heading out and hit the free shuttle that takes you to the bus station.
The last bus from this station to Siem Reap leaves at 3pm, so we missed it by an hour. Because we were a busful of travelers though (yay, easy pickings), they had us all get shared van tickets for $10 (there were also shared taxi tickets for $12). There is also currency exchange at the bus station. We wanted to take advantage of this since ATMs within Cambodia dispense USD, and you want riel for small change. The person in charge of getting us in the shared van told us that for 5 days we would need about $200 worth of riel. We said no (obvi).
Riel in Cambodia is only used for small change. Everything else, it’s better to just pay in USD. You really only need about $10-20 worth of riel on you at any given time, so we only exchanged for 20 dollars worth of riel.
We all piled in on the van and went on our way. It’s about a 3 hr drive into Siem Reap from the bus station.
Halfway through the drive, we stopped somewhere for a bathroom break. During our ten minutes there, random people kept coming in to tell us that we had to buy stuff because the bus driver said so. It was a little strange, but no one did anything and they finally just left.
We continued on our way and finally made it into Siem Reap. The bus dropped us off next to a fleet of tuk tuks. They announced that the rides were free and included from our fare into the city already. (Really though, there’s no such thing as a free lunch). Here’s where the real trouble started. There seemed to be one specific spokesperson, who had pretty good English. He asked us all if we already had places to stay. Amy and I replied us, while Jo said he was just coming with us. This head honcho then started telling him that our hostel was far from pub street (lies, it’s a ten minute walk), that it was a shitty place run by Canadians (also false, it’s rated highly on TripAdvisor and Hostelworld), and that the had great recommendations for places right on Pub Street.
When we said it was fine, Jo was coming with us, he then said no you can’t fit three people in a tuk tuk. Your bags are too big and the police will stop you. When Amy and I tried to butt in, he rudely exclaimed that he wasn’t trying to talk to us and that he was just trying to give Jo better options. It was a strange experience and he must have been getting some sort of commission because that man was just trying way too hard to separate Jo from us.
In the end we just said we’d take our chances, hopped in a tuk tuk, and left. Once we got to our hostel, there was a moment of awkwardness when the driver asked us if we needed someone to take us to the temples the next day. When we said that we already had someone, he said that he had given us this ride for free because he wanted to be our driver the next day (awkward…different story from on the bus?) we just made our apologies and headed in. Hell, we were tired from traveling all day and we just wanted to have people stop trying to take advantage of us.
The hostel was quite lovely, though we did hear some gecko music throughout the night (they sound like dolphins! Lots of clicking and honking). We hit up Pub Street for some 50 cent Angkor beers and went to sleep.