Thailand to Vietnam – Scambodia

Ok, I think for this entry I need to issue a disclaimer. I do actually quite like travelling and when I spent 2 weeks in Cambodia a couple of years ago, I loved the place. The following rant is the result of travelling too far, too fast. Also please forgive the holocaust gag. 

By the time we hit Cambodia, 6 weeks of constant travel had sent me madder than an octopus's nipple

To get into Cambodia you need to a tourist visa. Fortunately you can buy these at the border for around 20 bucks. Unfortunately this means there are scams. Nowhere in the world attracts crooks and scumbags like a land border – just look at Echuca-Moama.

The particular scam here is a deal between the tuk-tuk drivers at Aranyaprathet train station and a bunch of local berks who have bought some quasi-military uniforms and turned a travel agency near the border into an approximation of an immigration checkpoint. So the only way to get to the border is to get a tuk-tuk – the driver will assure you he is going to the real border but in reality will drop you at the travel agent’s – smile and tell the guy with faux uniform to piss off, then walk 500m to the real border where the real officials are, like all Thais not involved with tourism, polite and helpful.

Considering I had chest infection, had been up since 4.30 and spent 7 hours on a train not unlike one your Jewish grandad would be familiar with, I think I was pretty restrained.

            If you stop to think about it, and if you have crossed a few borders before, you will spot it a mile away. For a start, the only currency you can use at this scam border is Thai Baht… For a Cambodian visa. So unless Cambodia has decided to adopt the national currency of Thailand – unlikely because the two countries are virtually at war – this seems fairly odd. Also our passports hadn’t been stamped out of Thailand yet, so it would seem a little premature to be stamping into Cambodia. Anyway we avoided the scam and, feeling a little smug and worldly we bought our visas and walked across the border to the casino town of Poipet.        

             Waiting in the long line at Cambodian immigration, we got talking to Alison and Eric, an American couple who were also bound for Siem Reap. The word on the street (i.e the Lonely Planet guide book) was that a bus from Poipet to Siem Reap would take around 5 hours while a share taxi was only 2 hours. We decided to join forces and, with the addition of a Japanese student whom I shall call Honda, we elbowed our way through the nagging bus touts and set off for the taxi rank.

With five passengers, I had hoped to find some sort of minivan thingy and the guy at the rank sort of implied that’s what we would get. So when an aging Corolla pulled up I took no notice and presumed that the smiling driver who was talking to us in Khmer was a sort of village idiot who’s job it was to drive wrecked cars to a machine known as the cubinater while amusing tourists with his mad hand gestures and idiosyncratic attitude to personal hygiene.

No such luck. Four of us squeezed in the back while Eric, who had a gimpy leg from a rock climbing accident, got in the front and fell asleep. The sweaty little UN that was the backseat spent the two hours chatting in the usual vaguely annoying but inescapable way of travellers everywhere.

 “Oh we did Laos last year…”

“…if you get a chance, you have to go to…”

“it wasn’t touristy at all…”

Honda was an air pollution student who had been in Bangkok looking for evidence of smog that, for some reason involving words that apparently don’t easily translate from Japanese, accumulates there after being blown from China and India. And here I was thinking that Bangkok was just a dirty craphole.

The name Siem Reap means 'Thailand defeated'. Don't say I never teach you anything.

When we arrived in Siem Reap (“yeah, it’s a bit touristy you know? Not very authentic, but, like, a pretty mellow vibe… oh and you have to see Angkor Wat”), it was late afternoon and we checked into a hotel that Alicia and I had stayed at last year. An English guy had bought it and started doing it up. It was a cool place but he’d changed the name from the hilarious Wat’s Up Hotel (Wat as in Angkor Wat. Get it?).

We would have liked to stay in Siem Reap longer than one night to enjoy some cheap food and the lively little backpacker scene but it was Wednesday and we had to get to Phnom Penh to organise some Vietnamese visas before the weekend.

The following morning we hailed one of the unique and excellent Cambodian tuk-tuks, which are basically old fashioned carriages with their horses replaced by a Honda scooters, and caught a little bus to Phnom Penh. (Author’s note – all horses should be replaced with Honda scooters. I can steer a Honda but can’t make a delicious burger out of one. The reverse is true for horses.)

The trip, like most bus trips, was boring and uncomfortable and made me wish I was on a train. Or a motorbike. Or a share taxi. Well maybe not a share taxi.

Downtown Phnom Penh.

We stayed in Phnom Penh, got some laundry done and paid $30 for our Vietnamese visa (the same visa in Australia costs $75 dollars and takes weeks) then we wondered around for a couple of days getting hot and bored like everyone else.

Phnom Penh is a fairly pleasant little city but the only tourist attractions are a torture museum and getting drunk. I wasn’t up to seeing the incredibly moving killing fields again and I was still ill from a chest infection I’d picked up on the train to Thailand, so I’d decided to have an alcohol free week. I did manage to watch my first and last world cup cricket match between India and Australia with a pissed drug runner from Perth named Costa.

When our visas were ready we jumped on the next bus going east. The trip was enlivened slightly when Alicia had her mobile phone stolen and by the time we passed through the grandiose Vietnamese border complex and reached traffic-choked Saigon we had covered more than 3000kms and crossed five countries in less than three weeks.

We were in need of a spring roll and a lie down.

 

Pretending I can read near the mighty Mekong River

Georgetown to Cambodia - Trains through Thailand

The train. Better than my last share house

One of my favourite things in the world is to spend the night on a sleeper train chunting (shut up, it’s a word) through South East Asia. Years ago, with my brother and other members of team zebra, I traveled from Bangkok north through the Thai jungle to Chang Mai in second class sleeper. It was great. You could sit in your cozy little bunk, open the window and smoke cigarettes, your knuckles gently dislocating against passing trees. Every half an hour a man with a silly uniform shimmied up the aisle with a bucket full of cold beer. The toilet was just a hole in the floor and you could amuse yourself by aiming for the train track as you swayed drunkenly through the night. Who needs a playstation?

           So when Alicia and I booked tickets on the 23 hour sleeper from Georgetown in Malaysia to Bangkok, I had hoped for the same train. After all, it was basically the same line - a 4000km length of track that runs from Singapore to northern Thailand.

            What we got however was, well, a Daewoo. I don’t mean metaphorically, you understand, it was just made by Daewoo. Unlike their cars, some of it was even made of metal. You couldn’t open the windows but that’s ok, I don’t smoke anymore and besides, my knuckles have only just healed.

            The first few hours, until almost the Thai border at Hat Yai, it belted rain. A few days later parts of southern Thailand experienced severe flooding. A friend of mine was stuck on Koh Samui for 3 days.

The Malay-Thai border crossing was trouble free, and by nightfall we were tucking into a big Singha beer and some really decent Thai food. It is impossible to get a bad meal in Thailand. This was food prepared in tiny caboose (I’ve always wanted to use that word) on the back of a rocking Daewoo in the middle of nowhere. Can you imagine if V-line started serving meals?

Soon after dinner the conductor came and performed a sort of grumpy magic act and in about 8 seconds had turned our restaurant table into bunk beds. I immediately jumped into the bottom bunk and, in the manner of all people who are mechanically curious but also idiots, broke something, and spent ten happy minutes making it worse and virtually severing an index finger.

“You’re not going to fix it you know. And look, you’ve got arterial blood on the pillow.”

Alicia had a point.

Luckily the conductor was alerted by the picturesque red mist spraying out of where my finger had been and effortlessly fixed the bunk.

Whether due to blood loss or the rocking motion of the train, I slept for 10 hours and woke up in the sprawling outskirts of Bangkok with a sore hand and a chest infection. I still loved it though.

The view from our hovel in Bangkok

After an hour or so tooling around the backpacker ghetto of Khao San Road, we found a $8 room on the 427^th floor of a little hotel with no lift. Then we went drinking for a couple of days.

It is impossible not to drink too much beer and have fun in Thailand. I have seen women in full burqas staggering down Khao San Rd clutching a Chang and screaming Cold Chisel songs in what might have been Arabic at 11am. The beer is too good, the weather is too hot and the beer is too…beer. In certain parts of Bangkok even the water is beer, whatever that means.

A number of days later (I think it was between 2 and 9) we left for Cambodia.

There are two ways to get to Siem Reap in Cambodia. One is convenient and comfortable but can cost upwards of $9 which is how I found myself standing outside our hotel at 5am. I hadn’t even realized there was a 5am and had to google it just to be sure it wasn’t some sort of hoax.

Pre-dawn Bangkok is a strange and worrying place. Lost backpackers with warm Singhas hanging from dangling arms wobble their way home, wondering how they had spent their whole budget for 6 weeks in Loas on a hangover and herpes. Face-masked street sweepers battle rats the size of Toyotas and shiny-toothed taxi drivers quote ambitious prices to lure drunks to the early morning ping pong shows.

One driver in a rusty little cab told us that it was better to let him drive us to Siem Reap, a mere 400km away. He showed us with misplaced pride photos of the little car, boot open and stuffed with backpacks, with about 16 nervous-looking Germans crammed in the back seat, probably thinking, “Zis vas not in ze brochure”.

Alicia eating a cricket on Khao San Rd

            We had to walk away from the tourist ghetto to find a taxi that would take us to the station for less than an airfare to Bhutan, but we got there on time. I managed to purchase the appropriate ticket and find the platform without swearing at anyone - most unusual for me when traveling before breakfast.

            The train left on time just as the thick smog on the eastern horizon became a shade lighter than the thick smog covering the rest of the sky, this I believe is called a Bangkok sunrise. Or is that a sex act? Anyway the train was old and slow with no air-con and windows that opened so far that you could cheerfully decapitate yourself trying to take photos of the back half of the train. It was about $2 dollars for the 7 hour trip to the Cambodian border at Aranyaprathet.

After about an hour, the endless slums of Bangkok, um, ended, and we were tootling through green paddy fields interspersed with patches of jungle and an overloaded scooter or two - the ubiquitous and pleasing backdrop to most South East Asian train travel. I knew this would be our last train trip for quite a while - Cambodia only has one cargo train that leaves from somewhere not very interesting and arrives 17 hours later at somewhere even less interesting 45 km away - so I decided to enjoy it.

As we got nearer midday and the border, the landscape dried out and turned to flat scrub scattered with Eucylypt plantations. The smell of gums, the brain-melting heat and the brown grass could very nearly have been country Victoria - the mallee maybe. Except people from Wycheproof don’t have conical hats and Honda scooters.

So we arrived, sweaty and wary, at the Cambodian border - according to our guidebook a place rife with scams.

Malaysia – A Great Place to be Kicked to Death

Idiotson Crusoe

Four days in Singapore had cost us a third of our budget and partial use of my liver so we decided to get out. I had wanted to start the trip at Singapore’s cool old Keppel Road station but after a hot, frustrating day investigating we discovered a hitch. To buy a ticket in Singapore you have to pay in Singapore dollars – fair enough. If, however, you catch a bus 30 minutes to Johor Barhu in Malaysia, you pay in Malaysian ringgits. So a ticket to Kuala Lumpur is about 40 dollars or 40 ringgits, which would be fine if the conversion rate was about the same, but 1 Sing dollar buys over 3 ringgits so the price of the ticket is triple. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Singapore is weird. Also, you can’t book tickets in advance so we jumped on a bus from central Singapore and tootled over the mile-long causeway that joins Singapore to mainland Asia. The bus station and the train station were clean, efficient and – most surprisingly – in the same building. Sometimes in Indonesia they had been in different provinces – the bus station in Surabaya, Java is actually in East Timor and Jakarta’s central train station is on one of Jupiter’s moons.

It was disconcerting and I was waiting for the catch, so I was almost pleased when we were told that, because you can’t pre-book tickets on Malaysian trains unless you do it 24 years prior to departure, there were no sleeper beds left and we would have to spend 18 hours in a seat. Facing backwards. Luckily, there would be a half hour stop in Kuala Lumpur station, which was probably in the Philippines. 

An early morning view of Penang from the ferry.

            Malaysia might have the best food in the world. Thai food is great but even breakfast can be eye-wateringly spicy and I’m told the food in India is fantastic but three hours after you eat it your bottom explodes and you die. So the mix of Indian, Thai, Malay and European food coupled, almost uniquely in South-East Asia, with food hygiene levels that involve more than a sponge that is washed bi-annually in a river, it’s got to be pretty good. Which is why I was a little surprised to find myself having my first meal in Malaysia in a Burger King in KL Sentral station. But we only had half an hour to change trains and I wanted to put on a little last minute bum fat before spending the night in a seat.

            Around dawn we rolled into Butterworth station and walked down a clearly labelled walkway and straight onto a ferry which left immediately on its 15 minute trip to Georgetown on the island Penang. Just like that. Travel in Malaysia is ace.

The ferry had a viewing deck and the early morning sun shining on the historic port of Georgetown was pretty enough to make me forget the crushed vertebra and dislocated pelvis the 18 hour train trip had given me.

            After an hour strolling around the picturesque old town and generally getting lost, we found a great old hotel that looked like it hadn’t been renovated – or vacuumed – in 70 years. But it was cheap and had things modern hotels don’t offer like high ceilings, a hat stand and a fan that you have to turn on with a crowbar. We dumped our bags and went out in search of food.

After four days I had to be surgically removed from this chair.

            If there is a better place on earth to hang out, eat food and drink beer than Georgetown, I haven’t been there. The food is great and cheap, the beer is cold and, unlike Thailand and Indonesia, there are no coral reefs or indigenous craft workshops to feel guilty about not seeing. In fact the only touristy sight is an historic ruined fort built by some silly white people 5 thousand years ago or something and, despite being big and imposing, there’s nothing inside but a rusty cannon and a tree so you can see it in 20 minutes and get back to your noodles.

We sat on the water’s edge at what amounted to a boozy open-air shopping plaza food court and ate plates of $2 dumplings while slurping on enormous Tiger beers and watching cruise ships and thunder storms pass from horizon to horizon. One day we rented a scooter and rode most of the way around the island, racing around smooth windy mountain roads. I felt like Valentino Rossi. Except with a passenger. And a 100cc scooter. And very little idea how to ride properly. But still, it was fun and at one point we stopped at a national park and swam at a nice beach. On the way home we even saw monkeys and big monitor lizards. Then we got drunk and ate something on a skewer. 

Oh, chimpanzee that...

            The next day a man kicked me in the shins so we went to Thailand.

            I’ve taken night time wanders through Naples and Bangkok. I’ve been hopelessly lost in Cambodian forest villages and towns in Eastern Europe where the basic unit of currency is an AK-47. Once I even went to Morwell. But until our last night in Penang I had never been physically attacked. We were walking back to our hotel after a hard day’s sitting around and found ourselves in an unlit, empty street. A wild looking Malay guy with long hair and an unbuttoned shirt paced up and down the footpath not far in front of us. Bringing all my special services training to bear, I completely failed to notice him until he was about 30 feet away.

“Shit, that guy’s dodgy. Let’s just keep walking,” said Alicia.

I had wanted to stop and ask him to be Godfather to my first child, but I decided she had a point. As we walked past he gave me a full-force Muay Thai style kick to my right shin.

I guess he wanted me to fall down so he could kick me to death, steal my wallet and touch Alicia in the pants. Either that or he had taken offence to my anklet. It was so fast and odd that I had walked about 20 feet past him before I realised.

“Oww,” I said bravely and walked quickly around a corner to a crowded street, also bravely.

He didn’t follow and it all seemed more funny that scary. I don’t think we narrowly avoided an organised ring of criminal masterminds operating a kick-and-grab credit card scam. I just think the guy was mad as an onion. And if all you have to pay for staying in a jungly paradise ringed with beaches, full of great food, cold beer and cheap hotels is a weekly kicking, then I still think it’s a good deal. It would probably discourage German tour groups too, and that can’t be a bad thing.

Alicia considering an Evel Knievel style canyon jump in the Penang hills..