Sorry for the Group Email

We were steeled for our journey to Siem Reap from Ban Lung. The friendly hotel chap we bought our tickets from informed us cheerfully that the journey was overnight, and that we wouldn’t arrive until 5am the following morning. This is bad news when your bus leaves at 6.30am.

Worse, the journey was going to be on a minibus. Minibuses are faster that big buses, but they can be thoroughly nauseating, and they’re always crowded. The bus drivers will wait until every seat is filled, and, unlike a big bus, there’s nowhere to put luggage. Everything ends up filling the aisles and sitting at your feet.

There’s just time here to mention the fact that, in Asia, you can get a fake version of virtually anything. I had always suspected that bags, watches and DVDs were the thin end of the wedge, but nothing had prepared me for a fake Mercedes. To a beginner in minibus travel (unfortunately there’s nothing glorious about being an expert) our bus was a Mercedes. There was a Mercedes badge on the radiator grill, another on the back, and the steering wheel and leather seats were all branded. The hub caps also had that familiar three-pointed star. But the engine (which we saw when we stopped so the driver could splash water on it) said SsyongYang, a particularly horrible Korean brand of minibus with little legroom and underpowered air conditioning. The hub cabs, steering wheel and badges on the front and back were all aftermarket replacements. The seat covers were exactly that – the original upholstery was underneath them. Someone had gone to an exceptional amount of trouble to make this cramped, nasty little thing look like it had been made by Mercedes. I don’t understand why: people don’t book bus tickets (generally) based on the brand of bus to be used. Maybe SsyongYang adds the extra badges before the bus leaves the factory to stop complaints making their way back to them.

We drove around Ban Lung for a ludicrous amount of time, stopping at some places three times in the ultimately vain hope that a few more people could be enticed on board. We drove around for more than an hour.

Finally we were off, cannoning down the dirt track towards Stung Treng. We settled in with a sigh. Once you’re on a bus, it’s important that you resign yourself to your fate.

In the event, we didn’t need to worry. Perhaps our journey to Ban Lung had simply felt painless, but the minibus knocked a huge chunk out of our travel time. We were within 150km of Phnom Penh within six and a half hours, and in no time were at Kampong Cham, changing onto a bigger bus for the ride to Siem Reap. I could hardly believe my eyes – Siem Reap is only 250km from Kampong Cham, so unless the big bus stopped every two minutes or had a maximum speed of 12km/h, we’d be there well before midnight.

Karma, as they say, is a bitch, and it was little surprise when the bus driver shuffled up to us looking apologetic. “We have only small seats,” he said.

“Small seats? As in, in the aisle?” I asked.

Every big bus we’d been on so far had had unlucky people sitting in the aisle. Plastic children’s chairs are provided for the luckless ones who’d turned up too late for a proper seat. This time it was us.

There is, of course, nothing you can do about this. You could shout and swear about how you’d paid good money for your ticket and then demand a seat, but the very best case scenario would be that a hapless Cambodian would find themselves booted out of their seat. Or you could do what we did, which was grit our teeth and pull ourselves into the bus.

It was, actually, a pretty great bus journey. Sitting on a plastic children’s chair, I should point out, is pretty uncomfortable. Not only is it small and uncushioned, but it’s not fastened to the bus itself. So, every time the driver aborted an overtaking manuever or drove two wheels off the side of the road, our chairs, one in front of the other, would slide either forwards, backwards, or into the permanent seats on either side.

But the people around us on the bus took pity on us sliding around on our plastic seats, and we ate our bodyweights in shared fruit and treats, and we arrived before 8pm.

There was the inevitable gaggle of tuk-tuk drivers at the bus station, but luckily, I had a map. I knew exactly where we were and where we wanted to go. Siem Reap is small, and it was only a matter of six hundred meters to our chosen hotel, the Red Lodge. We were off…

“A dollar, you say?”

And with that, we were in the back of a tuk-tuk owned by a man named Pau.

I’m not sure if I misread the map on this occasion, or if I just delude myself that I can read them at all, but we went a lot further than six hundred meters. All told, it had to be more than a kilometer, and even when the sun goes down, Cambodia doesn’t become cool and airy. It remains like being stuffed inside a wardrobe filled with fur coats. And in the back of the wardrobe there isn’t a mystical, snowy kingdom into which you can plunge for refreshment, just a bastard with a space heater.

Pau dropped us off at the Red Lodge, which offered us an air-conditioned room for $10 a night, plus all the bread and jam we could eat. Before he left, Pau left us his phone number. “I hope maybe you give me some work,” he said, offering us his services for a per diem of $10 for the small circuit around the Angkor Temples. We resolved to call him in the morning.

Dave is sure he can read maps, despite what his wife maintains.