3rd February: Bangkok, Thailand to Battambang, Cambodia
Hua Lamphong station was surprisingly busy at ten past five in the morning. Still, we bought our tickets for the 5:55 without too much of a queue and I went off in search of food on the warm and damp streets around the station. Little was to be found nearby, although an hour later it would’ve been heaving with stalls. From a very friendly woman, I managed to get some fried dough with sesame seeds, which were pretty tasty with the tea we’d made before leaving the hotel. Kaja was already on the train and had gotten us some good seats facing away from the sun for this 6-hour journey to the Cambodian border. Remarkably, the third-class tickets were 49 Baht (£1.15) each. Perhaps this is why the seven-carriage once-per-day service filled up so quickly.
Heading out of the Bangkok suburbs we made the first few of 47 (official) stops. It was at one of these where we were joined by a group of 5 Cambodian women who filled in the gaps on our bench seats and those opposite. The food sellers were relentless on this route and from every single one the women bought something and offered to share with us. I was first to try a chewy dark red sweet, which was astonishingly sweet, sour, salty, and spicy in almost equal measure. It definitely helped keep me awake pre-dawn, as did their company. One among their group spoke a little English and with translation we found out where they were all from.
Continuing east, there was a moderately thick fog which mercifully kept the temperatures down for the first half of the journey. The landscape was flat and swampy, much like that just north or west of Bangkok. Unfortunately, none of the food vendors, for whom we often made unofficial stops in the fields, had coffee. I think they’d have done a roaring trade on this bleary-eyed bumpy service to the border. It was full to standing by this point. The worst part of the journey were the areas where crops were being burned. At one point, the entire carriage filled with ash and settled on everyone and everything.
The journey didn’t drag as much as I’d feared and sometime around half 11, we arrived at the frontier. This overland crossing has a bit of a reputation amongst backpackers for corrupt officials, but we saw no such issues. However, given how busy our train was, queues were unexpectedly long. Having read up in advance, we knew to go upstairs on both the Thai and Cambodian sides. We were out of Thailand in about 10 minutes, but filling out the customs forms and navigating the snaking queue into Cambodian took around an hour. With our e-Visas, we had nobody trying to bust our balls for a few dollars to give us a visa. We were through!
When booking this leg, we’d given ourselves plenty of time to make an onward bus connection and had time to chill in an air-conditioned café with coffee and lychee juice. Bizarrely, places here accept the Cambodian currency (Riels) but also Thai Baht and, most keenly, US Dollars. We broke out the emergency US Dollars, knowing that we could replace them from cashpoints here, which also dispense it alongside the local currency.
Walking west towards the bus station, we encountered the persistence of Cambodian taxi drivers! Along the hot and dusty road, we must’ve been approached 30 or 40 times in 10 minutes. Often by the same driver more than once! We found our pre-booked bus, which left from beside the main highway. The company had a little indoor area to sit and wait too. The driver was decent, but Cambodian driving definitely seemed a little on the eccentric side! This was epitomised by the tuktuk driver who took us across Battambang, after the two and a half hours in the mini-bus. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d never driven before today! But we got there.
Our hotel is quite nice. The building looks new fairly new from the outside but has a very wood-heavy fallen grandeur feel inside. We have a lovely balcony overlooking beautiful wats. The sun was already beginning to slump into the thick layer of dust and smoke that hung in the air at the start of slash and burn season. Hopefully the farmers wait a few weeks before the worst of it! We popped next door for dinner, and it was delicious and nutritious which felt like exactly what we needed after today. Both the sweet and sour tofu and the Khmer curry (akin to a Thai red curry) were zesty and flavoursome without being overwhelming spicy. Both the pineapple and mango smoothies with coconut gave us the fresh boost we needed too. The best thing of all though was finally feeling clean after a shower!
