Tuesday, November 23, 2004 (Siem Reep - Cambodia)
Picking up our passports and making our way to
the airport. Having lots of fun sorting out lots of headaches at the airport.
The many options for getting to Cambodia. Once again on the threshold of a new
beginning and our first impressions of Cambodia
Day 260 (70). Well, since I’m writing
this log entry, the problem with the train didn’t derail us and we arrived
in Bangkok safe and sound after all. Irritatingly, however, the guy that came
through the carriage making up the beds to begin with came back again almost a
full hour before our arrival to chuck everybody out of their bunks. He converted
all the beds back into seats and took all the linen away. I would ideally like
stay in bed up to the last possible minute ordinarily and felt somewhat deprived
of the opportunity to snooze some more when he did
this.
Dawn was just about breaking
when we strolled out of the train station to find a taxi. The taxi rank was
doing brisk business but it still took us almost fifteen minutes to find a
driver that wasn’t asking a ridiculous fare or would consent to using the
meter. We made it back to the Khao San Road area in a metered taxi for just
about half what the scam artists were
asking.
We wasted no time in finding
the hostel where we had left our passports to be furnished with the Laos and
Cambodia visas. They were there waiting for us, all complete and ready to be
taken across the respective borders. As it turns out, we may not use the Laos
visas after all but at least we have them now just in case we do decide to pop
across the border.
Although we were
back in Bangkok, we had no plans to stay there. We’ve decided to fly into
Cambodia today so the only thing we really needed to do now was to wait for the
100B (€1,92) airport shuttle to start running. I killed time with a half
hour on one of the Internet terminals and read some replies to a posting I put
out on the Thorn Tree travel bulletin board about alternative ways to get to
Cambodia by air. One option put forward in one of the more helpful replies was a
so-called Discovery Air Pass by Bangkok Air. For a fixed price of either $50
(€38,45) for national flights or $80 (€61,53) for international
flights, Bangkok Air sell a minimum of three of these tickets in a flexible air
pass. This seemed like a very good option for us as it meant that we could, for
example, fly from Bangkok to Phnom Penn to Siem Reep to Bangkok again all for
just $210 (€161,52). This is still a significant chunk of change out of
our budget that we had not originally planned for but it would at least give us
the chance to explore the Cambodian capital as well as Siem Reep with the added
bonus of getting us back into Thailand again. Since we were off to the airport
with plenty of time to spare anyway, we decided to speak to Bangkok Air directly
about this when we got there.
Our
100B (€1,92) airport bus started its first run of the day at six-thirty.
It departed from just across the road from where we were and we made sure to be
on it. Interestingly, a taxi tout was trying to ask where we were going and when
I told him that we were going to the airport by bus, he immediately tried to
convince me that this would take hours. Some of the scams and tricks these touts
use are so transparent that you have to laugh every now and
then.
At the Bangkok Air ticket
counter, we tried to obtain as much information about their multiple routing air
pass and the various other options for getting to Siem Reep but it was hard
work. The woman behind the counter didn’t speak particularly good English
and several times I had to distract her attention from whatever it was she was
doing at her terminal to get her to talk to me. One thing that did become
painfully apparent was that flying around here in South East Asia brings with it
numerous hidden costs such as airport departure taxes and so on. Suddenly, the
relatively straightforward task of booking an airfare was requiring more and
more deep thought. That nasty bus trip that we’ve been trying to avoid was
starting to look more and more attractive as we kept on adding up the cost of
all these airport departure taxes. A round trip for the two of us was now
climbing to the €450 mark and this will not do. We decided to think things
over for a bit before buying a ticket. Flights to Siem Reep depart eight or nine
times daily from Bangkok and there have always been several flights with
available seats on the day of departure each time I checked
online.
In the meantime, the other
major reason for being at the airport this morning was to find a British Airways
or Qantas ticket office. We’ve made quite a few changes to our round the
world flight dates and there was the strange incident a few weeks back in
Bangkok that I still felt uneasy about. When I had called back then to make some
date changes, the agent on the phone could not find one of the South Pacific
legs on our itinerary, even though I have the ticket, and so just added it back
in for me there and then. She subsequently sent a confirmation e-mail detailing
the changes I had requested but the list of flights she sent me still
didn’t include that one South Pacific leg. Now that we were here at the
airport, I wanted to make sure everything was still okay. We rolled our trolley
over to the terminal that housed British Airways and Qantas and after a bit of
nosing around, eventually found their combined ticketing desk. Alas, it was
closed until two in the
afternoon.
The multiple series of
flights we were earlier contemplating was just going to be too much for our
meagre backpacker’s budget to soak up but getting to Siem Reep by bus
meant staying here another night too and we didn’t fancy lugging our bags
back into town. In the end, we decided that the best option was to take the
Bangkok Air flight to Siem Reep on a one-way ticket and worry about how to get
back to Bangkok farther down the road. Back we went, then, to the Bangkok Air
ticket desk to book the trip. This is Bangkok, however, and nothing is quite so
straightforward as it first seems. It turns out that the bargain 4,880B
(€93,85) airfare can only be obtained by making an Internet booking
online. The nice woman behind the counter could sell me a ticket but it would be
quite a bit more expensive. Not to worry, we spotted an Internet café here
in the terminal building a little earlier so off we set to go find it. A rather
nasty surprise was waiting for me when I got there in the form of the rate they
were charging. Here in Thailand, we’ve become accustomed to paying about
1B (€0,02) per minute with a minimum charge of either 10B (€0,20) or
20B (€0,38). At this Internet café, they were charging 5B
(€0,10) per minute with a minimum charge of 75B (€1,44). Now, this
is probably one of those occasions where you have to stand back and look at the
bigger picture but all I could think of when I saw these charges posted was the
fact that this was five times more expensive than any other Internet café
anywhere else in Thailand and my built in budget self-defence mechanisms kicked
immediately into autopilot before I knew it. I was damned if I was going to
capitulate to the outright daylight robbery of ‘five times more
expensive’ and refused to go in out of sheer principal alone. I wandered
around the terminal building looking for an alternative Internet café but
the only other I could find was just as expensive and had an even larger minimum
charge to boot. So it was with more pain and reluctance that anybody else will
probably ever understand that I went back to the first place and extremely
reluctantly signed in. I just had to grit my teeth and swallow the €1,44
minimum charge for spending fifteen minutes online. How will we ever manage to
finance the rest of our trip
now?!
Fortunately, the Bangkok Air
website was functioning normally today and I booked the one-way flights for the
two of us without a hitch. Once again, however, another nasty surprise was
waiting for me at the end of the booking process. The booking engine slapped on
two junk charges after I confirmed the order. The first was a $2,75 per person
insurance charge and the second was a $7 per person international fuel
surcharge. Ahhhhhhhhhh! The final tally for the two one-way seats to Siem Reep
ended up being 11,160B (€214,61). Considering that we could have taken the
bus for just 550B (€10,58) each, this has turned out to be quite an
expensive option, relatively speaking. Oh well, it’s done now. Gritting my
teeth again!
It was still a while
before the BA ticket desk opened so we asked if we could check our bags through
already. The earliest flight I could book us onto was the five o’clock
early evening service. We had just missed the eleven o’clock flight but
the check-in clerk said she would put us on standby for the three o’clock
flight and told us to come back at two o’clock to see what the status
was.
For the next several boring
hours, we sat around intermittently eating ice cream, chocolate cakes and
various other ludicrously expensive airport snacks just to kill the boredom. We
were still quite hungry, funny enough, by about lunchtime and found a nice pub
to sit and eat fish & chips in. We were actually wandering around the
terminal building in search of a place to sit where we could plug the laptop
into a power socket when we stumbled across the pub. The train journey up from
Surat Thani to Bangkok was quite boring for the first few hours and I spent much
of the time playing a game on the laptop to kill the time. I ended up almost
completely draining both batteries chasing my high score – which I managed
to just miss before completely running out of
juice!
Two o’clock eventually
rolled around and we went to check on the status of our three o’clock
standby flight. Unfortunately, this was now delayed until five o’clock and
we were told that we would be better off sticking with our original flight but
they at least allowed us to check our bags in
now.
It was only after numerous hours
of more boredom that things finally starting to happen again. The BA ticket desk
was now open and after waiting our turn at the one operating ticket window, I
showed the clerk my huge pile of tickets and explained about all the date
changes and so on. Much to the extreme irritation of the steadily lengthening
queue behind me, the ticket clerk spent the next hour and a half sorting things
out for us. It turns out that the previous ticket agent I spoke with over the
phone a few weeks ago that had added that South Pacific flight back into our
itinerary had not realised that it was originally a flight operated by Air New
Zealand and had added this flight on a Qantas ticket instead. The busy clerk I
was now talking to noticed this straight away and summarily cancelled that
flight in favour of leaving the original one in tact. She suggested that I call
Air New Zealand myself to make sure that they have the correct dates listed for
us in their computer. I did so after we were all said and done and, fortunately,
they did have the correct dates listed for all the flight legs with them. I was
also able to push forward our Auckland to Fiji flight to connect with the Fiji
to Vanuatu flight. We will have to stay overnight in the airport but we will now
have more time in New Zealand and only one stay on Fiji instead of
two.
Our December 18th
wait-listing for the Bangkok to Sydney flight was still nowhere nearer
converting into a confirmed booking and since we cannot really proceed without
knowing what is going to happen with this, I went ahead and cancelled the
wait-listing. This means that we will fly to Sydney on December 12th
after all. That actually works out well because it means we will not have to
worry about making the Sydney to Melbourne journey in a
rush.
Even though it took a lot
longer than I had thought it would, I’m very glad that we were able to get
all the flight issues worked out. I’ve been able to do a lot over the
phone with the round the world tickets but for revalidation they specifically
need to be sighted. In other words, a ticketing agent must physically look at
the tickets and the only place where we can achieve this for miles around is the
BA ticket desk in Bangkok
airport.
With a whole load of worries
now off my mind, we checked into our Siem Reep flight and went straight through
to the gate area. In retrospect, we probably should have waited in the departure
lounge for a while longer as, other than a stuffy room full to bursting point
with other travellers, there was absolutely nothing there to keep us occupied.
The flight before us was delayed several times whilst we sat and waited but,
luckily, ours left shortly after six o’clock, just a half hour or so later
than scheduled.
Out flight to Siem
Reep would last an hour in a relatively small turboprop plane and we would
arrive shortly after dusk. During the flight, I felt quite anxious about
Cambodia and what was there waiting for us. In fact, Cambodia is the real reason
why we are here in South East Asia to begin with. Moreover, the temples of
Angkor Wat near Siem Reep are the reason we are here. Other than specifically
wanting to visit these temples, I know very little about Cambodia, save for the
various stories I’ve read in the guidebooks and heard from other
travellers. Most of these stories seem to involve the bad road from Poipet, near
the Thai border, and the corrupt border officials, police officers and mafia
controlled taxi drivers at that border crossing. The poor state of the road
between Poipet and Siem Reep is legendary in its own right and every traveller
has a tale to tell about their experiences getting into Cambodia through that
overland route. As our plane came in to land, I felt like we were once again
standing on that anxiety-generating precipice of the great unknown. Once again,
we were arriving in a new place, knowing little about it, and with absolutely no
plans for what to do once we got off the
plane.
My first impression of
Cambodia is that it is a poor country. The airport is a single building that
sits next to the runway. We walked from the steps of the plane the few yards
over to this building and joined some eighty or more other travellers already
queuing up at the three immigration desks with the busy officials stamping away
at their passports. Immediately beyond the immigration desks was the single
luggage belt that was already moving and the passengers from the flight before
us that was delayed for so long were slowly filtering their bags from it. The
very necessary climate control in this building was achieved by ceiling fans and
a single, floor standing, industrial-strength air-conditioner unit, which I was
lucky enough to stand in front of for much of the time that I was queuing to get
my passport stamped. I don’t know if it was hotter ore more humid inside
the building or out but either way I was starting to drip. The room was small
but had a cavernous feeling to it and was actually quite tastefully appointed.
The immigration officers were smiling and the queues were moving quickly enough.
The whole border control process turned out to be no big deal in the end. Even
the customs officer waved us straight through when we reached him and I noticed
that we hadn’t completed a customs
form.
The scene outside was pretty
much as I had expected it to be with plenty of taxi and hotel touts all vying
for the individual attentions of each and every exiting passenger. The first
thing I noticed was a little pre-paid taxi stand with a happy looking chap
standing there, writing out a taxi receipt for another passenger. I went
straight over to him and asked about getting a taxi into town. I figured this
would be at least more orderly than trying to navigate the waiting throng of
drivers behind him all on our own whilst laden with backpacks. Everything here
in Cambodia works in US Dollars and the price of a taxi into town was $5. This
was exactly what I had expected based on what I’d read in the guidebook so
I agreed and a driver was quickly summonsed. A nice looking Toyota Camry
appeared, almost out of thin air it seemed, and a very friendly young driver
helped us with our bags. In we got and off we
went.
Our driver was a very nice
young man and we got on very well right from the get go. My instincts were
telling me very good things about him as we got to know each other during the
ten-minute ride into town. By the time we arrived at our first choice of hotel,
we’d already arranged for him to drive us around the temples for the next
couple of days and he will assist us with other things such as ongoing
transportation and so on. He was quite happy to take us to all the hotels we
wanted to see, which he did, but offered a couple of other suggestions just in
case we were not happy with what we saw. Ordinarily, ‘commission’
alarm bells would be ringing in the back of my head in this situation but
something told me that this guy was on the up and up. Everything he told us
about all the hotels we visited turned out to be true, including the prices we
ended up negotiating. Ultimately, we found one of the places he had suggested to
be the best deal and the most comfortable room. We chose this place, called Home
Sweet Home, which had a nice air-conditioned room and en-suite bathroom for $15
per night. This was the cheapest place we visited and if our drive did earn any
commission on the cost of the room, which I doubt, then I was happy for him to
receive it. Our room is a little more comfortable than the place we stayed at in
Bangkok and about the same price.
We
agreed that our driver would take us around the temples tomorrow in his
air-conditioned car and he will be here tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.
All in all, it’s been a very long day today. We accomplished a lot
logistically and covered a great distance. We will sleep well tonight –
and dream of Lara Croft, no doubt.
Posted: Tue - November 23, 2004 at 11:40 PM