The Journey to India

Some travel days are just more interesting than others.

When it was time to leave Cambodia, we needed to go from Siem Reap to Bangkok in order to catch a night flight to Calcutta, India. So we had a choice - $170 per person for a flight or $11 per person for a bus. We’d just spent money to fly out of Vietnam and didn’t want to pay $340 for just a one-hour flight, so we chose the $22 option. Naturally, it would cost us in other ways…

We were put on a minibus leaving Siem Reap (very comfortable and air conditioned, we were told), with the promise that we’d take a bigger bus from the border on to Bangkok. The minibus had 22 seats, including fold-down seats that filled the aisles. One of these seats was broken, so our capacity was actually 21. Of course, we had 22 passengers. And luggage, which was piled in whatever empty space remained.

The 22nd passenger, one of the bus company employees, actually sat on top of a pile of luggage. This was the view from our seats…



O.K., so we had little leg room and there was no easy way to exit in case of emergency. But we had seats, and so as we set off down a paved road out of Siem Reap, it seemed that we could handle it for a few hours. Soon, however, we turned onto a dirt road. A bone-jarring, jaw-shaking, please God make it stop kind of dirt road - which we had to endure for three-and-a-half hours.

After finally making it back to a paved road, the driver immediately stopped, opened the windows and turned off the air conditioning. Well, they told us the bus had a/c, but no one ever promised it would be on for the entire ride ;-) There was more traffic here, which meant fumes pouring in through the windows. Which is a really pleasant aroma when mixed with the smell of dust and sweat. Sometime in here, Lisa saw an advertisement on the side of the road for flights to Bangkok. “Oh...a plane,” she sighed.

After leaving Siem Reap at 7:45 a.m., we finally made it to the border at Poipet at 1:30 p.m. We then lugged our bags about one-half mile, through the Cambodian and Thai immigration windows, and then to a café on the other side of the border, where we were told the next bus would pick us up in about 20 minutes. More than an hour later, someone pointed us in the direction of a flatbed truck.

You’re kidding me, right?

No, no, they said. Only 10 minutes to where bus is.

So we all loaded onto benches on the back of this truck, with luggage piled at our feet, and set off once more.

“I’m sure this will be a good story one day,” I sighed.

Ten minutes later, they dropped us off again. And it was true – a real, 45-seat bus awaited us. Comfortable, cloth seats. Leg room. A toilet. Air conditioning. And when we began driving to Bangkok, we noticed that the roads were paved and smooth! We all practically jumped for joy. What a difference - we knew that Cambodia was mired decades behind Thailand in development terms, but it’s amazing how stark that contrast can appear when you cross the border by land.

The travel day itself was far from over, but everything else was a relative breeze. Four hours later, we were in Bangkok. We didn’t even care anymore that we were dropped off in a different location than what we were originally told. We dragged our luggage through the humid streets of nighttime Bangkok for a while, then finally hailed a taxi to take us to the airport, where we changed clothes and had some dinner before our 11:40 pm flight. We were on our way to Calcutta, India.