{"id":668,"date":"2009-01-07T06:55:47","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T14:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/?p=668"},"modified":"2009-01-07T06:55:47","modified_gmt":"2009-01-07T14:55:47","slug":"welcome-to-cambodia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/2009\/01\/welcome-to-cambodia\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Cambodia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, here&#8217;s my brief summary of how I got to Angkor Wat from Bangkok, Thailand, by land:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li \/>Take a government bus from the Eastern or Northern Bangkok bus stations.  Leave by 7:30am.  You can probably buy your ticket the same day, just show up at 6:00am.  (190 baht)  You should be going to Aranyaprathet, which is on the Thailand side of the border from Poipet.\n<li \/>I don&#8217;t think it matters much whether you get your visa in advance in Bangkok.  They didn&#8217;t hassle us.  Perhaps if you&#8217;re in a flood of tourists off a tour bus, you might have trouble.  If they try to get more than 1,100 Thai baht, demand a receipt, get their name, and report them to the Cambodian tourism board.\n<li \/>Immediately upon leaving the Cambodian immigration, you are required to get onto a free bus to the bus station.  If the police (who are lounging off to the right, in the shade) see you getting on the back of a motorcycle taxi or into a car, they will probably stop the car and fine one or both of you.  To my knowledge, nothing is stopping you from walking out of the area.\n<li \/>The bus station is basically empty.  I think you just catch a taxi there.\n<li \/>Our taxi cost $50 for three of us to Siem Reap.  We had no US dollars on us, so we paid in Thai baht, 600 each.  I was later told that a taxi should cost $25 for the entire car.\n<li \/>The taxi will drop you outside Siem Reap and hand you off to motorcycle taxies and tuk-tuks.  I think these guys basically try to take you to places where they get a commision.  I insisted on Two Dragons, and my driver reluctantly took me there.  I then paid him $6 to haul me to Angkor Wat to see the sunset, then bring me back.  I was later told that this should cost $2 or $3.  Still, he was a nice guy&#8230;\n<\/ol>\n<p>Random things about Cambodia that I didn&#8217;t know:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li \/>The Riel (local currency) is about 4000 to one US dollar.  So they pretty much just use dollars.  When they give change, they&#8217;ll give partial dollars in Riel notes.  I haven&#8217;t seen a US coin yet.\n<li \/>The local language is <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cambodian_language\">Khmer<\/a>.  Maybe I&#8217;m just ingorant, but it wasn&#8217;t obvious to me and I didn&#8217;t want to offend anyone by asking how to say things in &#8220;Cambodian&#8221; if that&#8217;s an external name.\n<li \/>Numbers one through ten seem unique to Khmer, but from 11 on, it sounds almost identical to Thai!  I have no idea the linguistic history which causes this.\n<li \/>There is a no-man&#8217;s land between Thailand and Cambodia.  There are hotels and casinos here.  It&#8217;s kind of weird.  Big, glitzy casinos and in front of them roll some bare-footed Cambodians pushing a home-made cart loaded with a half-ton of ice.  Yep, weird.\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, here&#8217;s my brief summary of how I got to Angkor Wat from Bangkok, Thailand, by land: Take a government bus from the Eastern or Northern Bangkok bus stations. Leave by 7:30am. You can probably buy your ticket the same &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/2009\/01\/welcome-to-cambodia\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[259,257,255,252,256,258,226],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-aranyaprathet","tag-bangkok","tag-border-crossing","tag-cambodia","tag-cambodian-visa","tag-poipet","tag-thailand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":669,"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions\/669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}