Siem Reap to Bangkok

Happy 65th to Matt's mum for tomorrow!

There are 3 options for getting the 400 or so km to Bangkok from Siem Reap; fly, take a bus straight through (approx. 12 hours) or take a taxi, tuk-tuk and bus. We opted for the latter. The road between Siem Reap and Poipet (the Cambodian border town) is a notorious road. Lonely Planet refers to it as the 'Boulevard of Broken Backsides.' As a main artery road out of the country one wonders why the government has not improved it; it is rumoured that it may have something to do with a relative of a politician from an unnamed political party who happens to work for an unnamed airline that possibly operates flights between Siem Reap and Bangkok.

We took a share-taxi with a French-Canadian couple from our hotel this morning to Poipet. The road actually wasn't too bad; although, yes, dirt track for much of the way and very bumpy in parts it wasn't half as bad as we had thought. We got our exit stamps at Poipet then filled in our arrival cards and got our stamp for Thailand (the old passport's filling up nicely!). We then walked to a tuk-tuk; there was only one around, a 2-seater. The guy insisted all 4 of us plus 4 backpacks and 4 daypacks would fit in. And we did. There is photographic evidence. He dropped us at a bus station where we caught the midday bus to Bangkok (we were the only tourists, or farang as the Thais call us) on board. We arrived at one of Bangkok's 3 major bus stations at around 5pm. Different to the tourist buses we've been getting, there are no hotel touts waiting here. We piled into a taxi which took us to the New Siam Guesthouse. Luckily they had a couple of rooms (none of us had pre-booked). We've refrained from staying on the Khao San Road, the mainstay for many of Bangkok's backpackers, but we are in the same area, an area called Banglamphu. It's such a contrast to, say, parts of China where we saw a handful of westerners, there are tourists everywhere here, as there have been generally throughout Vietnam and Cambodia. It just makes for a different experience.