The roads of hell (Steve)

Well, despite the re-assurances of the travel agent in Bangkok that its á nice bus' and despite the fact that we had been warned about Cambodia we were a little disgruntled to find our day (28/2/05) went like this;

7am-Pick up time, only the minibus wasnt to take us to the 'nice bus' it was taking all the way to the border!! So bad start really, pretty uncomfortable too.

12noon (roughly) Pull up at a point about 10kms short of the border, whereupon the 'helpful' guides will get our visas for us, and charge 1200baht for the privilledge. We state that its only 1000 at the border but as they had dropped us in the middle of nowhere we were stuck, because we would apparently miss our bus the other side.

2pm-The border crossing. Waiting in a queue, with backpack, in seering heat, for ages anyway, then another quick ride on a motorbike taxi thing to a bus station, which was actually a shop of a travel company. We then had a 30 minute wait for our 'nice bus', which turned out to be a cramped, bouncy 24 seater whose air con wasnot working. Wonderful so far.

So the bus gets underway and soon we are wondering if we'll make it to Siam Reap, to call the roads roads is really not right, rutted dirt tracks is far more acurate. But when your old bus is trying to go at 40kms an hour over them you quickly realise just how insane this is. How the bus doesnt split down the middle is anyones guess, we got shaken around so badly, but just to prove the saying that theres always someone worse of than you is correct, some poor girl had food poisoning!!! The bus then broke down taking 1.5 hours to fix, although they also got the air con to work, but only for an hour or so. Some of the bridges on the track are wooden and very worring, the driver helped by telling us that sometimes bigger vehicles (we're on a frigging bus!!) break the bridge and either get stuck or fall......thanks pal.

After all this we finally get to Siam Reap at 11pm, 5 hours late, feeling like we'd gone a few rounds with Lennox Lewis. In India we thought we'd found some bad roads, this place is up there with Mozambique as having the worst roads on the planet (according to the lonely planet) and we can well believe them!! Bring on the boat to Phom Phen!!