Travel Day to Chanthaburi

Our goal today was to cross back into Thailand and make it all the way by bus to Ko Chang, an island on the east side of the Gulf of Thailand. We headed to the bus station (if you can call it that - more like a hole in the wall), and waited for our bus. Half an hour after the scheduled departure time, there was still no bus. Rather, an SUV showed up, and a rather well dressed man told us the bus was stuck in traffic and he would take us to line up with its route rather than have the bus detour to this station. It was all highly unusual. What could we do but get in? So he drove us to some major road in Siem Reap and dropped us off at some indistinct location, and voila, our bus magically appeared, and we got on. It is truly amazing that things here work as well as they do.

We had heard that the road from Siem Reap to the Thai border is audaciously bad. It did not disappoint. It was a relentlessly potholed dirt road. In one of the guidebooks I read that Cambodian roads are among the third worst on the planet; only Congo and Mozambique are worse. Rumour has it that one of the Thai airlines, which has a monopoly on the lucrative Bangkok/Siem Reap route, bribes the Cambodian government to keep the road in poor repair so more people fly. All along the road were signs of 'construction' but there were no actual crews out working, except one: they were applying asphalt manually to a 1km section of the road. From a simple mental calculation, the road should be paved in about 200 years.

After about 200km and 5 hours later, we arrived at the border town of Poipet, exited the Cambodian checkpoint and entered back into Thailand, at Aranya Prathet. The contrast between the two sides is striking: Poipet with its squalor, and Aranya Prathet seemed clean and modern by comparison. We then took a cab from the border to the town centre, and were dropped off at the bus station.

Like so many things in Thailand, once you think you know what to expect, you're wrong. When you think of 'bus station' you think of a ticket counter, and gates which have a sign indicating where the bus is going to. There was nothing like that here, just a building with a bunch of shops. We spent a good half hour being led in circles by locals when asked them where to take the bus... a lot of times they didn't seem to know themselves. We then figured out that there is this unmarked spot you stand at, and the bus periodically arrives and picks up people.

The bus ride to Chanthaburi was uneventful, but very long, and we didn't arrive until 7PM. Though we wanted to make it to Ko Chang today, we though it best to stop here for the night, given the time. So we found a hotel, settled in, then found this restaurant by the riverfront. It seemed quite upscale, but was full of locals.

One thing that became evident here was how much of Thailand that we had seen was geared for tourists. Chantiaburi was not. Most of the signs were in Thai script (much less English), and almost no-one spoke English. Getting around here and communicating was significantly harder than almost all of the other places in Thailand we'd been to.