Tediously Travelling to Thailand

Today we arrived at the last country both me and Lauren are visiting together. We got the 8am bus heading to Bangkok, which was only ten minutes behind schedule - basically on time by Cambodian standards. We had asked for a bus that went all the way through; where you weren't required to take all your belongings off at the border and get on another bus the other side. However that's exactly what we had to do.

We arrived in Poipet, the border town around 11:30 and got off the bus with all our luggage. First we had to go into the Cambodia departure office, fill out the departure cards and get our passports stamped and fingerprints scanned. This was fairly straightforward. The queues are fairly short and there was quite a few open desks each with their own queue.

Next we had to walk about five minutes to the Thai immigration arrival office. We got arrival cards and joined a queue for 'foreign passports' that was waiting to go up some stairs. Being in Asia, some people didn't understand the long line waiting at the bottom of the stairs and just pushed round the side. This led to a mad dash and scramble up the stairs when we were eventually allowed up and a hectic situation where everyone was trying to get through one door into a room  to join a queue to reach the immigration desks. The queue snaked around the room and moved very slowly. It took us two and a half hours to get through to the other side. At one point I saw two ladies who were told to go back as they were in the wrong place hand some money to the immigration office worker and he let them continue. Unfortunately we didn't have any money either otherwise we would have bribed him to get to the front of the queue.

Once we had had our passports stamped we had to put our bags through a scanner and into Thailand we went. We met with the bus company and the other passengers outside KFC just down the road from the border. I got a drink and some chicken nuggets. Then we all piled into minibuses and off we went. After about 30 seconds we were stopped at a police checkpoint. All the doors were opened and about 3 of our passports were checked. We were counted numerous times and told to put our seat belts on. There was lots of discussion but we had no idea what was going on. After a while they shut the doors and we turned round and went back to KFC. We think the issue was that the girl on the front seat didn't have a seat belt available for her to use. The bus organisers told her she'd have to get a motorbike through the checkpoint and then she could just get back on the bus. We all found this a funny suggestion by it didn't ever materialise. Eventually (we think) the organisers just put her on a different mini bus. We went back to the checkpoint where we were repeatedly counted again but this time we were given the all clear and off we went to Bangkok at around 3:15pm.

Hour an hour later, we reached another check point. Thankfully this one we whizzed through. We had a 15 minute petrol and toilet stop and then about 5 minutes later we stopped again at another petrol station. That's when I noticed the check engine light was on.  The driver had the bonnet up and was banging something and continually turning the engine on and off again.  I have no idea what he did but after about 15 minutes he got back in the minibus and we continued on our way, check engine light still on.

We had one more toilet stop around 7:30pm and then we made it to Bangkok. The traffic was absolutely crawling and it took us forever to get to our destination. We were dropped off near the busiest backpacker road and we got a tuktuk to our hostel, arriving over 13 hours after we left Siem Reap. We checked into our room, which we currently seem to be sharing with 4 Spanish boys and then headed out to the nearest shop. There was a market type thing just across the road and I got some chicken pieces and then a drink from a nearby shop. Chicken and a drink seems to be the thing to have today. Then we returned to the hostel, showered and retired to our beds.