OMG What a Crazy Bus!

Yeah, so it seams there was a bit of a physical price to add to that cheap bus ride. The bus arrived at Thai-Cambodian border from Bangkok in record time.. Around 4 hours. "we've covered well over half the distance, we must be over halfway there", I dumbly thought. Boy was I wrong.

Processing visas, eating lunch, passing through Thai immigration, passing through Cambodian immigration and diddling and waiting for the group on the other side took around 2 or 3 hours. After this point we boarded what was apparently a luxury bus for Cambodia. It had air-con, so I wasn't complaining.

Eventually we left town and headed toward the 'highway'. "Only 140 km to go", I thought, "we're practically there already." At around 3:45 pm we hit the highway and I saw what bumpy roads really are. Although it was sealed, the road had HUGE craters in it every 2 metres. Sometimes I though we we were on a ship instead of a bus. The passengers rocked and bounced with every contour of the road. Imagine the roughest part of a muddy mill yard stretching for 120 km. Now imagine driving on it!

I'm sure the jarring experience gave everyone thoughts of "are we there yet", although no one was dumb enough to say it. We stopped once to eat, once to change flat tires, and once for a drink/pee break. I noticed on our last stop that our luxury bus was actually a Japanese school bus-- Su-koo-lu bah-su was written on the side in Katakana (a Japanese script).

All together the bus took 9 hours. Assuming an hour of breaks, we were traveling at an incredible average speed of 15 km/h. From Bangkok, the whole trip took 16.5 hours, so much for the 13 I was told when I bought the ticket.

I think I'm gonna sleep well tonight. I'll be dreaming about the over 120 USD that I saved and the beautiful temples I'm gonna see tomorrow.