AND WE'RE IN CAMBODIA, BABY!!!
sarah, maddy, and i got into trat yesterday in the late afternoon. we'd planned on staying in the sa hotel there, but the lost driver pulled over at pop's guesthouse to ask for directions. sunny, the owner at pop's, was of course like "ohhhh, why you go there? here, it's very nice! very quiet! let me show you! i give you a discount!" sunny ended up being a really sweet woman and she hooked it up with a bitchin room on the river, so we stayed there instead. she had these awesome toenails and we were like "wow, your toenails are really awesome" and she was like "oooh!! you can get them done too for only 100 baht!" so later she sent us over to her nail place and we got the MOST BEAUTIFULLY ASIAN PEDICURES EVER.
anyway, i bet you wish i'd get to the part about cambodia, huh? we told sunny we were on our way to sihanoukville and she said she could sell us tickets. we were wary. we've been told not to buy international package deals--who's to say that bus the thai woman promises is waiting at the cambodian border will be there? but sunny seemed like a trustworthy woman, and she said we could leave at 9 am, while lonely planet had us leaving at 6 am (and she told us even earlier, if we wanted to catch this specific bus at the border). so we decided to trust sunny and buy her ticket.
lo and behold, here we are now, sitting in sihanoukville, not paying one riel more for any travel. amazing.
we got in this van in trat and at first we thought it was just gonna be the three of us, which would have been awesome. but then these six thai/cambodian (?) guys got in and they were disgusting...hacking up spit the whole time, talking real loud, bringing on their gross dried fish food. ew. we finally ditched them and got to the border. we walked up to this booth on the thai side, where the woman checked out and stamped our passports. confused, i leaned in and asked where we go to now."
"walk down to cambodia,"she said, and pointed down the road. well, ok then, it's time to walk to cambodia.
so the three of us white girls walked 100 yards down the road and to the cambodian border crossing area, where we immediately became the spectacle of the hour. we gave a guy our passports and e-visas for cambodia, signed some stuff, got our heads zapped for our temperatures, and sat down for a while--joined by about six cambodian men just fascinated by our white skin. they were making fun of each other, joking about a fat one being pregnant and wanting to switch skin with us (a guy and i made a deal to cut off our arms and sew them to one another's bodies). sarah and i started crying from laughing. cambodia: instant thumbs up.
the cambodian guy who spke the best english escorted us into his camry then down to koh kong, where we were supposed to catch a bus with this magic ticket. he chatted with us about cambodia, flirted with a tollbooth girl, and spit some slang at us like i've never heard in asia. he dropped us at a bus and off he went, leaving us with these two guys who tried SO HARD to get sar and i to say some word like "giel" but with some insane accent thingy and you had to make your throat do something crazy...i dunno. when we went to the bathroom, three girls ran up to us to ask for money, then just sort of hung around, smiling and giggling.
we got on the bus and took off at noon for a crappy, real bumpy bus ride through gorgeous cambodian countryside. i'll have to show you pictures. we stopped at this random podunk market-ish place, where we switched to a van with the driver, the three of us, this one thai guy who would not stop talking to me despite us not speaking the same language, and a cute family of four with the most adorable children i've ever seen. the little boy and i started playing but then that talky guy just kept trying to talk to me. after FOREVER (slash maybe an hour) he finally got off.
around 4 pm, we hit sihanoukville. the driver tried to ask us for more money, but we just kind of said no and walked away awkwardly. we checked into our beachside bungalow at tranquility inn, and now i'm friggin starving cuz we haven't eaten real food in hours. dinnertime.
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