Bussing to Cambodia

Thursday May 16

We got up early and took a Mini Bus with about a dozen other travellers from 7:30-1:00.  We made a lot of stops that felt unnecessary and unnecessarily long.  Fortunately i met a really awesome girl from Hamilton! Such a small world.  We had very lengthy conversations for the rest of the ride.  People from your home country just feel like family when you're abroad! The stop at the boarder took about and hour and half to get everyone organized.  Then once in Cambodia we took a full size bus.  We had to wait until it was full so we got talking with some other travellers and met A guy from Mexico and another guy with duel citizenship UK/USA.  We found out that our friends had paid $$27 and $22 respectively, for the same trip! At the boarder we had read tourists were often pressured to convert their money.  This was indeed the case, so we did not convert our money but despite our caution our friends did. They told them there would be no ATMs available and that they would charge high fees.  They also told us that if we used their currency "reel" we would get better prices than using US dollars.  But the exchange is 4 200 reel to $1 USD who can do the math quick enough to compare the price?  Once they got back and saw ATMs everywhere and slowly calculated our their money our friends realized they had again been tricked.   It's frustrating that a person has to do such careful reading to avoid scams but we're glad we did!  

Our second bus ride seemed to take forever but we had good company so we had a lot of fun.  We made very long stop at quite a nice remote restaurant that I'm sure has a great deal worked out with the tour company.  We to our final stop at 7:30pm.  Ever so conveniently they dropped us 3km outside the city.  A herd of motorcycle rickshaws were awaiting us...how thoughtful.  Again a scam so out of spite we walked to the city with our little crew.  We found a very nice hotel lonely planet recommended for $12/night with clean white sheets and fresh towels (total luxury for a backpacker).  We all hit the shower.  We were not a pretty smelling crew at this point as it is +37 with about 50% humidity here.  Then we went out for pizza and Mexican food.  The restaurant options are quite western.  It was a really fun night of laughing and telling stories of home and travels.  We had a really great time.  Sadly the girl from Hamilton had prebooked at one month stay at a yoga centre so we said farewell to her.  I was sad to part ways.