It was a mixture of somberness and excitement as the bus moved slowly against the traffic jam, then past the rows of heavily French buildings in Phnom Penh, from its denseness to scarceness and finally out into the countryside where all we could see were kampong houses lined up along the roadside with expansive paddy fields in the background.
It’s always sad to say good bye to a place that you have traveled to and grown quite fond of because you’ll never know when you’ll be coming back there again. 🙁
That is the sad part lah. The exciting part is of course the idea of coming to a place for the best time and even more exciting is the fact that you know for sure the place is going to be a very exciting one.
I mean, we are talking about Siem Reap here. It’s like a place that I’ve heard so much about and yet I don’t know anything about as I would discover later.
Quite so many times when I traveled to a new place for the first time, I really thought I had known about it thanks to all the blogs and websites like LonelyPlanet.com and Wikitravel.org and all – but then quite EVERY TIME would I find out that my imagination of the place had strayed off from how it is in real.
I would say the bus ride from Phnom Penh is so smooth and almost 100% undeterred. One thing about Cambodia that you should know is the fact that it is so blessed with flat land which is probably why the country is one of the major producers of rice in the world.
It is so flat that you wouldn’t see any hills along the way, not until the last quarter of the journey when you are beginning to see mounds of hills scattered here and there but still there are too little of them you would hardly notice. Cambodia really is a damn piece of flat land.
Most bus drivers and conductors would put the traveling period at around 6 hours but in actuality there’s no guarantee that the bus is going to make it to Siem Reap within 7 hours or even 8 hours. My estimate was around 8 and half hours thanks to all the stops that the bus had to make along the way.
But of course, stopping is good when you don’t know what you’d see once you are off the bus. I had seen Andrew Zimmern took a bite at one of these on Bizzare Food and then the damn lucky couple at 1000 Places To Visit Before You Die and I remember how I sneered at them because it seemed to take them so much effort (the couple, not Zimmern) to take even the tiniest bit of it.
Coming face to face with them, I only had myself to sneer at because I could feel a gale of puke building up in my stomach by just imagining how those hairy things would feel like slipping down my throat.
I DID want to taste them – the intention was there- but thinking that I had another few hundred kilometers to go on the bus, I needed to be in the best form possible. I didn’t want to be stuck in the bus with some funny taste in my mouth and down my throat that threatened to explode at any time, any minute. (Alasan? :-P)
Scaling a country like Cambodia on a bus is probably the best way of getting to know the country in the best way possible. It’s like watching a marathon of TLC that continuously features Cambodia for more than 8 hours or so. Imagine how much you can see within 8 hours! (a lot!)
The bus made a few more stops to drop off AND pick up passengers along the way. I kid not – They DO pick up people along the way and let them sit on the little stair at the end of the isle when they are no more seats left. It really is not an ‘express bus’ after all. 
But then, since we had nothing to catch up with in Siem Reap, at least not on that day, we had no problem with all the stopping. An aunty who was one of those came on board along the way was so eager to have a conversation with my travel buddy Ulai and I could not believe that they were actually talking to each other.
It really was like listening to duck quacking to a clucking hen or something and quite amazingly, the conversation actually took place for quite a long time, long enough for the aunty come down to buy boiled corns from a roadside stall and offered one of them to Ulai. Needless to say, she didn’t offer any to me. 🙁
If there was something that could have possibly killed me on the seemingly unending bus ride, it would be the Cambodian MTV songs that they kept playing without a single stop on the TV set over at the front.
I mean, they were good songs – so melodic and all – and I actually liked them in the beginning but when they kept playing hour after hour after hour, they were all beginning to sound alike to me after awhile.
The Cambodian version of Baby Baby (check out the dislike count LOL) came as a relief to me. The familiarity in that song kinda eased my ears up a little and for the first time in my life, I was so glad that this Bieber guy does exist in this world that we’re living in now. LOL.
Every now and then we’d see a group of cyclists wheezing by and quite every time I’d catch myself saying ‘One day Jipp.. One day..’. With such a flat land and straight wide roads and beautiful countryside that they’ve got here, cycling would certainly be such a wonderful experience here in Cambodia.
There really is no way you can tell if you’re almost there in Siem Reap unless you’ve been there several times before because the road is so monotonous and so is the landscape.
Just when the bus was slowing down and we thought that we were already there, it would continue to roam on for another hour or so and we’d sit back and continue staring at whatever there was to stare at.
The bus would make one last stop for a toilet break – and probably for you go get something to munch over and of course to give you a little bit of chance to take in the scenic beauty of the countryside.
Seriously, the countryside in Cambodia is so beautiful I really felt like running right down to the paddy field and turning into a Shah Rukh Khan in some Bollywood movie or something. It was just so oh-my-gawding.
I couldn’t believe how 8 hours could be so long when you’re traveling to a place you’re so excited of getting into.We watched how the day drifted slowly into night and that was when the real torture began because we had nothing to gaze at but the Cambodian version of K-Pop on the TV screen.
When the bus finally slowed down and pulled into a compound where hordes of people and Tuk Tuk drivers were waiting in eagerness, we knew we had arrived.
