Kampot to ko Chang

We bought seats on a minivan from our kind hotel owner. Throughout the trip, I and then Barbara and I have been very careful to ensure that we get a full seat, that minivan will not be filled with chickens, etc. or that our minivan is not the back of a truck. Perhaps we were too relaxed after successfully traveling through Cambodia for several days.

And in fact, we were picked up by a clean minivan from our hotel. It seemed propitious. But then we were told that there was a mixup with the time and actually we would be taking a bus that left 30 minutes later. We loaded our things on the bus. A few minutes later we were asked to get off the bus. Our things were then loaded onto the back of a minivan already groaning with freight (see picture). In fairness, we started out with a full seat each, but the mini was packed pretty full. That would have been fine, but then our driver continued to pick up passengers. My traveling companion is a bit anxious, so at every stop I kept asking if she wanted to get off and catch a cab. She said no, I'll be okay. But when the driver stopped for a passenger along the road, she snapped and insisted on getting off. From there, she argued with the driver. He said, "this is how we travel in Cambodia." We begged him to call us a tuk tuk since we were quite far from Kampot at this point and had all our luggage.

Eventually he relented, gave us our bags, called a tuk tuk who took us back to our "nice" hotel owner. We figure several deals had been made as we were sold from one carrier to the other. Everyone made money here.

The hotel owner, who is from Ireland and looks like Mr. Bean, arranged a cab for us. A driver picked us up, but then took us to another location and picked up our real driver. Afterwards he filled the tank of the camry. It was jerry-rigged with a gas tank in the trunk, right behind where we were sitting. I had no seatbelt.

The trip across the mountains to the Thai border was terrifying. Our driver was going 60 or more the entire way, and per Cambodian protocol, drove on the wrong side of the road until an oncoming car appeared. I guess this makes passing the many slower vehicles more efficient.

At one point we stopped at a restaurant where another minivan filled with passengers and covered with dead chickens, feathers and all. Really, it looked like the van was wearing a feathered hat.

We eventually made it to the border and passed through easily.

We picked up a shared van with the Europeans who had shared the original minivan with us (four of them, two had been at our hotel, other two took cooking class with us). Several hours later, we were at our beautiful tropical hotel where we had to wake up the manager to get a room.