The cycle too the border from Bangkok took a few days taking us though small villages and quiet roads and of course past many Temples.. It’s lovely cycling here when it’s not the middle of the day.
Life starts about 4.30am. It’s the cool time of day and people take advantage of that to socialise with friends in groups walking, running and even cycling.
It’s also the best time to get up and get going for us so we slowly moved through the Thai countryside towards the border starting at dawn and watching the countryside change as the sun rose from an inviting orange glow to the fierce and unforgiving heat of the day.
Border crossings are a lottery. You read horror stories about nearly all of them and usually find they are not too bad.
For our crossing out of Thailand we allowed a day, staying at the nearby border town and having a day off at the Velo Hotel to plan on onward route. A bicycle themed hotel with it’s own BMX track out front.
They waved Tilly in and she spent the two nights dripping oil on their marble floor in pride of place for everyone to admire. We kept sneaking about and clearing up the drip!
Our Rohloff internal gear has a leak. I serviced it in England, in the cold and here it’s very hot and the gear mechanism is probably even hotter so we assume the expansion is pushing some excess oil out of the seals.
We’ve contacted Rohloff about this before and their reply was basically “It’s German, it’s bombproof, it will always have enough oil in it no matter how much it leaks so don’t worry about it” so we don’t. But we do have to be careful with drips early in the tour – which is the only time this ever happens.
So, we arrived at the border and despite having read stories of how it could take hours, had cleared Thailand immigration in a few seconds leaving Tilly outside the Immigration hall and then pushed over the bridge to Cambodia.
The bridge was donated by Britain, which seemed an odd present to give someone, and like many countries the border crossing was basically organised chaos. People wandered everywhere, and cars and motorbikes weave their way from the left hand side of the road to the right, as this is one of the few border crossings where the countries drive on opposite sides of the road. The policy of just let the drivers sort it out themselves in no mans land works well as there’s ten times as many pedestrians and motorbikes so the poor old cars have to go about 2mph.
Cambodia, we had been told, can be a bit of a scam border crossing. But again it was well organised, they had a policeman ready to look after Tilly (though he may have had other duties) and we went upstairs for a 40 minute queue for our passport stamp, which was better than Atlanta the last time we visited the US!
They were all polite, helpful and happy and as usual at border crossings there were 2 officers working and 10 others hanging about not doing a lot.
It’s quite an art being an immigration officer here. The guy has to take our finger prints, which for Linda is traumatic as she hasn’t got enough of a finger print on some of her fingers to operate her phone, due to her previous vocation as a cat burglar presumably, so she often has to try again and again until they give up or it works.
Once done with the finger prints it’s the photo, then it’s down to the stamping. There’s an immigration card to do and the passport. Both have to have the border crossing stamp, followed by a date of entry stamp and of course a date to exit by stamp. Then there’s a small ID stamp and then the guy has to sign it all. It’s all very neat and meticulously done too.
Our stamp obtained we went back to collect Tilly, thanked the policeman and then went through all the car controls having all our stamps double checked. It confused everyone why we had got them already as the pedestrians all are upstairs and coming down in Cambodia, not back into Thailand.
And we were in! First thing was to get coffee and sort out our phone sim. We use esims now as they are just so simple to set up and you don’t have to supply passports etc to get them. We have a regional one for Asia but that doesn’t include Cambodia for some reason so we activated our Cambodian one and were up and running.
Coffee done, gets some cash time. Well that’s all a bit confusing here. The cash machines dish out dollars, the locals take KHR or Thai Baht, so any till receipt you get has all 3 currencies on and you get your change in local KHR regardless of what you pay with.
As there’s 5000KHR to the pound it’s going to take us a while to be able to cope with 50,000 for dinner not being a rip off. I’m sure we’ll get there in the end.
The roads are much busier and less well maintained in the border town, but we only had to go a couple of Kms on to our hotel for the night. But the driving is much more Indian than Thai.
The drivers jostle for position and everything operates pretty smoothly with the bikes, pedestrians and tuktuks until you get a few cars. They’re all too big for the narrower streets in Poipet and slow right down to pass each other and the whole place grinds to a halt.
We arrived at our hotel, after our huge 10km cycle and the staff were in a state of shock when we said we’d started in Bangkok, and really that’s nothing compared to many proper cycle tourers, some of whom will have cycled from England.
One of the reasons we picked this hotel was it was next to an Indian restaurant, which turned out to be closed, so we had to get a Tuk tuk back to near the border to another Indian that was fabulous! I’d imagine we won’t get another one for a while…
Anyway, we’ve got our route planned for the next few days but after that we’ve not actually decided which route to take yet, so the afternoon was spent looking at our options…
Amazed Tilly didn’t need her passport stamped – obviously due to her celebrity status! I mean, she must have a passport, right?!!!
She indeed does. She was issued one in South Korea!