We were leaving Saigon at 9:00am on a bus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The tour company office was over in Pham Ngu Lao and we had to be present and accounted for by 8.30am. So there was no danger of us missing our usual egg breakfast. We were running out of Vietnamese money, which was good because like Mongolian Togrog, it seems like no other country wants them so you can’t exchange them anywhere outside Vietnam. They don’t mind you paying with USD, so it worked out fine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We waited for a few minutes in the bus company office before they asked to get in a minivan to be shuttled to the actual bus. But first we had to cross the road, through a swarm of motorbikes. I took one step onto the road, decided to wait for an actual gap as I had all my bags on, and stepped back only to find that there was a guy on a motorbike trying to go through the ‘gap’ behind me. Neither of us were going very fast; there was a lady on the back of the bike as well and all that happened to them was that the bike fell halfway over, against a pole. The rider must have hit his wrist on the left-hand wing mirror because he was rubbing his wrist and straightening the mirror. I didn’t even get knocked over and had a tiny graze on the back of my leg.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I managed to convey my apology via the bus company lady who came running out of the shop to see that everyone was alright, and then continued on across the road. It was more of a boo boo than an actual crash, but now I can proudly say that I have been run over by a motorcycle in Saigon.<\/p>\n
Then we got in the ‘shuttle’ and went about 200m up the road to the coach. They loaded everything on, we got on, and we sat on the bus for about three hours until we started getting near the Cambodian border. On the way there we spent something like an hour just getting out of Saigon; said process sped up quite a bit when we reached the freeway but there was still a lot of overtaking and dodging motorbikes and honking of the horn at 4WD’s that wouldn’t get out of the fast lane.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Customs and Immigration at teh border could easily be described as a joke, except that it wasn’t funny.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here’s what they did:\u00a0<\/p>\n
About 10 busloads of people got off their buses and walked into the square-ish white building. You handed your passport to some dude at a fold up desk who took the departure card out. The immigration hall was about five metres wide and maybe 75 metres long. After the departure card desk, for which there was no obvious line, you came to a baggage X-ray, for which there was no line at all, because that part of the hall was already filled with people lining up at the immigration booths about 40 metres away.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For the immigration booths, there was no line at all. Just a bunch of people pushing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
You put your stuff in the baggage X-ray, and pray that you can squeeze all the way around the other side of the machine before your stuff gets knocked off the edge of the roller belt. Then a French woman pushes in front of you so that she can wait for her stuff which is still halfway through the machine. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Then you join the masses pushing loosely toward the immigration desks, with no idea as to whether there might be one line for Cambodians and one for Foreigners, and no idea as to what generally is going on. Then the people who have got their passports stamped already at a window before the metal detector start trying to push their way through the crowd, but without explaining why they are doing so until they arrive near the head of the line, where resistance is greatest.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After a time – 45 minutes – we made it to the head of the queue, where there are three immigration booths, and even some two-metre long metal rails to make sure people queue properly. At the head of the line we presented our passports to the chap at the desk, only to find we were supposed to push our way through and give them to one of the guides from our bus company, who then presents them as a group to the immigration chap. Not that they took the time to inform us of this before we got off the bus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then you squeeze around the booth and wait on the other side for the passports to be scanned. The bus company guide calls your name out, and you collect your passport and wait outisde. If your name ends with C, you get yours first and wait outside. If your name ends with W, you wait another half hour or so. While you are waiting, you get hungry, but you also see the bus company guide take a handful of green passports and go into the duty free shop.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then you get back on the bus and drive over to the ‘Entering Cambodia’ part of the show. The guide takes everyone’s passports and gives them to the officials, and then we all get back on the bus and go down the road to a cafe for lunch. I had vegetable soup, which was very nice, and filling too, because I hadn’t eaten for about 5 hours. The toilets were basic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You get back on the bus and drive along for a while, then they go around and hand back the passports, this time with Cambodian Visas and stamps in them. Okie doke….\u00a0<\/p>\n
After that you stare out the window at the wide flat scenery, which is either rice fields with the occasional palm or coconut tree, or vast watery mangroves, or decrepit villages of wooden huts. You might even consider wondering how far it is to Phnom Penh from here, seeing as it’s only 250km from Saigon to Phnom Penh, and you might also daydream as far as wondering were in town our hotel will turn out to be, and whether we might get there before 3pm.\u00a0<\/p>\n
All of those things would be a mistake.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At 2.30pm, an hour from the border, we got to a traffic jam.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We sat still for one hour. Then we moved forward 25 metres. Then we sat still for half an hour, and the bus driver decided to take a short cut down a side road. He turned left, went straight for a bit, and then turned right, bringing us back to the side of the traffic jam, where we waited for half an hour to discover that the road was blocked by a metal fence and a cop, and we could not rejoin. So they set about backing the coach all the way back down that street, and then going further ahead through some narrower alleyways that the bus could only just fit through, arriving finally at another right hand turn where we saw that about 200 other vehicles having the same idea.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
We waited half an hour, when it became apparrent that what the traffic jam was caused by vehicles waiting for a ferry across the river to our left. To our right now were the huge lines of vehicles we had abandoned. In front of the new line we had now joined was a metal fence, and a cop. We waited another half hour, counting how many cars could fit on each ferry and how many times vehicles from the main line of traffic were let on to the ferry without any sign of the gate in front of us moving. After all, we appeared now to be in the line of people attempting to push their way in at the side; why should we be allowed to go anywhere or do anything?\u00a0<\/p>\n
It got dark.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One ferry full of vehicles from our line went through. We moved forward about 30 metres.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At about 7.30pm we actually got our bus onto the ferry, but only just, because they had to put down wooden planks to get over some lumps and bumps on the ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the other side we actually just drove off down the road, which was quite relieving. We drove along for another half-hour, during which time you might have been forgiven for thinking we were actually going to get taken to where we had paid to be taken.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No. We were not.<\/p>\n
At what was allegedly a police checkpoint the bus stopped with allegedly zero minutes warning and we were told that because it’s the last night of the Water Festival, which is some type of big deal in these parts, they were not allowed to take buses into the city. We could get a tuk-tuk. Translation: you have to get a tuk-tuk, because we’re taking your baggage out of the bus and putting it on the ground, and when we’re finished doing that we’re going to drive off like there’s not been any crime committed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meanwhile the tuk-tuk drivers were swarming around offering to take us into town for $20USD. We had paid $12USD for the bus trip from Saigon to Phnom Penh; and unless I was very much mistaken we were not in Phnom Penh. Actually we had no idea where we were, so we might have been in Phnom Penh, but it definitely didn’t look like it. It looked more like a roadside dive with a petrol station, and a French couple with an 18-month old girl explaining to the tuk-tuk drivers that the taxi from the airport is $7, so how can it be $20 to get into town?\u00a0<\/p>\n
What became of them, I don’t know. After some bargaining one of the drivers agreed to take us into town for $10, which was close enough to $7 that we thought, ‘Alright then, let’s go ahead and get fleeced if it will get us to our hotel’.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
He drove along for a while and then pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. Apparrently there are police checkpoints on the way into the city but they only sting drivers who are carrying tourists. So he wanted us to get out ahead of the checkpoint and walk, while he drove through, just an average guy in a tuk-tuk, and met us on the other side. We declined.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Predictably at the checkpoint we did get waved into what looked like a schoolyard where we waited around for the driver to go and get a ticket of some kind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘The police will ask me for a bribe,’ he allegedly said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘This is because you are foreigners, this is Cambodia and not like in your country,’ he allegedly said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So then he comes back telling us the police want $5, which you and I know is somewhere near the average weekly income in Cambodia, and more than any policeman would even dream of extorting. Alice put her hand up for trouble and said ‘OK, I’ll go with you and I will pay them.’ So I sat in the tuk-tuk wondering if I was about to hear a vile scream, or if she would come back and say ‘They actually did want $5,’ or if she would come back saying ‘Ha ha, they only wanted $1’.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But we had only ashed our traveller’s cheques yesterday and didn’t have any denominations smaller than $20. So after some jiggery pokery about ‘What are you doing here?’ and ‘They don’t need to speak to you’, not from the police but from other waiting Tuk-Tuk drivers, our driver agreed graciously to pay for us and allow us to pay him back, seeing as the police didn’t have change for a twenty. All they had, Alice says, was a bit of a funny look on their face. And the driver didn’t exactly unfold and display for all to see whatever note it was that he gave to the cop.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Allegedly $5USD.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then when we all got back in the tuk-tuk he had a bit of a moan about ‘Now you believe me, don’t you?’, but eventually we continued on down the road. After another 10 minutes or so we came to a big wide bridge, where there was another checkpoint and where our driver deferentially agreed once again to loan us some money to pay the police. $5USD, allegedly. He then informed us that we would be allowed to pay him $20USD when we arrived at the hotel. Or, seeing as how he was a bit offended that we didn’t trust him, which was probably because the price kept going up, if we wanted we could pay him $15USD and be left where we were standing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We had a bit of an argument along the lines of ‘We only got in this tuk-tuk because you told us this would cost $10,’ and he basically tried to say ‘No, no I meant $10 plus taxes’, which was pure weapons grade balonium. But, having no idea where we were or how to get where we were going, and given that the only other form of transport we could spot were other tuk-tuks, eventually we just agreed to pay $20. Obviously the thing to do would have been to grab our bags, get off, and tell the driver ‘Your choices are now between $10 and $0; which would you prefer?’, but you don’t tend to think of these things when you’re tired, hungry and extremely pissed off.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So; we did in point of fact get taken to the correct hotel, which was nice. It took them a while to find our reservation, which was a pre-tour booking through Intrepid. We could see our names on the ‘Welcome to the Tour’ piece of paper Intrepid had posted in the lobby, so we were definitely in the right place. Actually, it took them until the next day to find our reservation, because after letting us stay there for the night they had to call the Intrepid Guide to make sure that we had pre-paid for our room.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Which we had.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And that must be the lot, you say?\u00a0<\/p>\n
No.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At 9pm we went next door to a Thai restaurant for dinner, and didn’t take any mosuite repellent with us, and got about 10 bites on each leg for our trouble.\u00a0<\/p>\n
All in all; a day to forget.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Greg<\/em><\/p>ngg_shortcode_0_placeholder","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We were leaving Saigon at 9:00am on a bus.\u00a0 The tour company office was over in Pham Ngu Lao and we had to be present and accounted for by 8.30am. So there was no danger of us missing our usual egg breakfast. We were running out of Vietnamese money, which was good because like Mongolian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,48,27,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures","category-adventures-in-asia","category-cambodia","category-days-of-being-scammed-relentlessly","category-we-are-stuck-in-country-x-and-need-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301,"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregandalice.com\/theadventuresof\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}