In the Navy.......

Now that I have everyone’s favorite Village People song in your head….

I got up bright and early this morning and quickly resolved that I was done with the beach. A day seemed quite enough. I packed up everything, including my not quite dry laundry, snapped a few photos of the beach and hopped on a motorcycle taxi.

Today, I resolved, would be a day of transit. I needed to get over the Thai border eventually, and was paranoid that the transport from Sihanoakville to Thailand would be unreliable.

I unsuccessfully tried to locate the LCDI, the students from which I met yesterday afternoon. The moto driver only heard “CD” when I asked if he knew where the school was, and that brought me to a CD shop.

I had the driver check with a few other moto drivers. We checked with a real English school. We checked with a backpacker’s café. Still no luck… no one had heard of the place. Fully defeated by this point, we continued on to the other side of town where the port and ferry terminal were.

After an hour wait it was 12 noon and departure time. The ferry took around 4 hours to get to the Cambodian town closest to the border. The ride was gentle compared to any bus anywhere. For the first part of the trip, I sat on the roof enjoying the sun and wind until the rain drove all the travelers below. Throughout the trip, I ran into an Austrian backpacker whom I had met on the crazy bus to Siem Reap from Bangkok. I also chatted with a teacher at an international school in Saigon. He was traveling overland through Cambodia to get to Thailand.

Getting off the boat was mayhem! I felt like I was in India already. There was a crowd of pick-up truck taxis and moto drivers shouting and pulling at my arms for the dollar or two they would get if I chose them. I got on the polite guy’s truck immediately. After a minute of sitting there, I realized that another truck (run by the pushiest of all the drivers) was almost full. I defected to that truck and soon we were on our way.

The border crossing was rather quick. At once point, I was calculating Cambodian Riel to US Dollars to Thai Baht in my head to change money without getting ripped off. I half thought of keeping the riel just to avoid hassle.

An hour-long minibus brought us to Trat, a small Thai city. One of the two Thai passengers turned to me and asked if I was going to Bangkok. In the spirit of idiot-proof travel, I said sure and followed along behind him.

It seems we had just missed the 6 pm bus… the next wasn’t until 11 pm, which would get us into Bangkok quite late. I was ready to buy my ticket when my new Thai friend rushed me down the street to another station.

On the way I learned a few things about this helpful guy. His name is Poang Wan and he comes from Bangkok. I his asked if he was Thai and he said. “Yes, Thai native”. The next question was what his job was which produced the same answer, “Thai native.” I thought he misunderstood my question so I went into an extended explanation about how I was a teacher and Canadian and a man, so that he might get that I was asking about his job and not his nationality. I turns out that he wasn’t misunderstood at all. He wasn’t saying “Thai Native,” but “Thai Navy.”

Everything made so much sense all of a sudden. I though he was a Thai traveler coming from Cambodia, but the Khmers hate the Thais, so that was unlikely. It turned out that he was on border patrol and now had 10 days leave to go and visit his parents and sisters.

We got to onto a 7 pm bus at the other terminal and stretched out our conversation as much as the language barrier would allow. I showed him some photos of my students in Korea and we talked about our families a bit. He then surprised me completely and pulled a Thai navy hat (looks like and army beret). “For you,” he said. I was really shocked by the kind gesture. Having packed lightly, I had nothing that special to give. It took me a bit of thinking to remember that I had two 1000 won notes from when I left Korea. Worth about 2 USD, I passed them to him as the only interesting gift I could think of (I gave a few Oreos too).

The bus trip was like a luxury cruise after travel in Cambodia. In less than 5 hours we were in Bangkok. I said good bye to my new friend, and caught a cab with some other travelers to Khao San Road, where I plan to buy a few things tomorrow before I head on to India.