Cambodian epiphany

The journey from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia was always going to be interesting. Siem Reap is the nearest town to the Angkor temples, and if there's one thing you do in Cambodia, it's the Angkor temples. We bought a ticket from our Bangkok guesthouse for a bus to the Thai border with Cambodia then onward transport to Siem Reap. 12 hours on the road, and from all the reports we'd heard, it would be a bumpy road in terrible transport.

So, we boarded our luxury coach at 7.30am on Thursday feeling extremely clever. The sun was bright and everything felt exotic and worthwhile, even crawling through the busy morning streets. we pushed on through Thai countryside, taking advantage of those smooth Thai roads, until Aranyaprathet, the border town on the Thai side. Decanted into a pick-up truck (pick up trucks are a typical way of getting from the border to Siem Reap), we were then taken to a roadside cafe whilst others in our group got visas. Phew! no 6 hour pick-up journey for clever us! an hour of hanging around in the heat then back in the pick-up for the border crossing.

Having never crossed a land border on foot before, this was pretty entertaining. Feeling like evacuees, we followed our guides - a sequence of interchangeable busy men - to Thai immigration. Then came the weird litter-strewn hinterland between the two countries, where people live in eye-watering poverty just yards from huge duty free malls and casinos. On to Cambodian border control where there was much precise stamping of passports and photos, another session in front of a tiny spy cam, some nodding and thank yous. Then through to our first Cambodian bustop, where we watched our group re-assemble and the busy men marked us with and a sequence of coloured stickers to divide and subdivide us for the ongoing journey. Some hours later, Dan and I were selected for a special bus with a few others, under the aimiable watch of our man Luonn and we were driven across a wild-west landscape to the bus station in Poipet, the Cambodian border town. There, our chariot awaited, our transport for the 150km journey to Siem Reap, a tiny blue bus, dusty, rickety and from the seventies if not before; air-conditioned, just.

It was a bone-shaking journey but I enjoyed it more than any of the bus journeys I've taken before. The road to Siem Reap is shocking - a dirt track, littered with huge potholes, that you negotiate at not much more than 20 miles an hour. The vehicles that thump along everyday - the rubbish buses dwarfed by the huge 4x4s that ply the road - kick up a thick red dust that gets under your skin, under your tongue, in your luggage. The rumour is the airlines that run planes into Siem Reap have paid the local authorities not to improve this road to encourage tourists to visit by plane. It does seem particularly peverse when you finally enter Siem Reap and see lot upon lot of luxury hotel, glitzy behemoths of prosperity, and many many more under construction, that the investment should not have reached the road to the border. But air tourists miss the opportunity to cut through the villages, the paddy fields, to see the families that line the roadside, and to stop at the road-side cafes and run the gauntlet of the many, many children that swarm around the tourist buses asking for coins from England. They also miss Luonn, the super guide with an irrepresible line in monkey jokes and a determination to practice his English on all foreign tourists, be they English themselves or indeed, Swedish or German.

You do a lot of this journey after dark. Some spurious sources have suggested that the boys who run the buses eke out the journey to ensure you arrive shattered and in the dark in Siem Reap. You'll be much more likely to take a room in their best friend's guesthouse this way, even though there is a high probability you'll be sleeping with bugs and there's no hot water. But an evening journey affords you a glimpse of the local people cooking dinner, and kicking back in the evening as you creep past. You get a beautiful sunset on the way. And for those used to Western skies, lurid and orange with light pollution, it gives you the chance to see more stars than you could imagine in an inky black expanse that is terrifying when the sun disappears.

As we bumped through the night, we saw a storm to our east, raging behind a big plume of cloud, concentrating its force in this one area. The lightning lit the sky with amazing violence and great forks hit the earth every few seconds, but the full might of the storm was hidden from us by that plume of cloud. We heard no thunder at all. We followed this strange storm for several hours with the plume of cloud slowly dissipating, stretching out to form a dragon-shape with the yellow full moon as an eye, and the storm still raging in its tail.

We arrived in Siem Reap at eleven. Sure enough, Luonn did have a friend with a guesthouse, conveniently situated in a small industrial estate to the north of the town. There were no bed bugs, so we had to sleep on our own, and no hot water either. But, this didn't seem to matter as it was a welcoming place and you could drink cheap beer and practice English and Cambodian for ever with your new friends. And this is where we met Baby, our Tuk-Tuk driver, who took us round the temples over the next few days.

It was a long, day, but a good day. Cambodia is a surprsing place - beautiful and incredibly sad. The violence of its past, and it's a very recent past, and the obvious repercussions - the ongoing poverty, the weird demographics, land mine victims all over the place - is like a huge gash running through everything, through so much kindness, and happiness and so much natural beauty. It's a like a big ugly monster in the corner, you want to ask everyone about it, but you don't want to break the spell. We're going to the Foreigh Correspondants Club bar now to mull it all over.

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