The long and winding road

After being away for as long as we have, you have some unique travelling experiences, but the Bangkok to Siem Reap (Cambodia) journey was simply the worst journey of my life.

Starting at 7:30 we got the coach from Bangkok for the start of our journey and the first four hours to the border were relatively trouble free. Then it all went a little pear shaped. Numerous people (including our bus driver) tried to sell us entry visas into Cambodia for twice the price. Once we finally got through to the Cambodian side, our bus appeared to have left us behind although it eventually turned up.

The road from the border to Siem reap is notorious for being under developed and rocky, and it didn't fail in its reputation. Occasionally there was tarmac but for the most part its an uneven, bumpy dirt track (Apparentley a Cambodian airline is paying the govenment off to keep it that way encouraging people to fly instead......allegadly). This road is bad enough at the best of times, let alone when it's raining. When that happens the road then turns into a muddy sludge which took us from a heady 30k per hour down to 10kph. That is until we reach one particular corner. For some reason this corner was banked at either side, which made it even more challeging. SO much so that it had caused three rather large dumper trucks slid of the road into ditches.

After all of that we finally got into Siem Reap around 10:30pm, only for the police to pull the coach over and try to extort money out of the bus driver. By 11:30 we finally made it to bed.