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Stacked Pomelos in Siem Reap’s Old Market (Psar Chaa)

The pomelo I bought at the border between Thailand and Cambodia seemed to have a vague fishiness. I don’t know if it was pesticides, the pomelo itself or my imagination, but it was the only thing I had to eat and we still had another few hours before we would arrive in Siem Reap so I continued munching on it.

“Why don’t you just fly?” my friend asked when I told her the journey from Bangkok to Siem Reap would take about 10-12 hours of buses, motorbikes, immigration stops and taxis. The flight is an hour. Of course, flights are more expensive, but beyond that there’s not many advantages. There’s something gratifying about slowly moving from one place to another, watching the landscape, the people and the signs gradually morph across regions and, in this case, countries. I’ve never met someone in an airport terminal here, but I’ve met plenty of people on buses and bus stations.

This ride I was sharing a taxi from Poipet, the Cambodian border town, with a Dutch woman and her son, who were returning to Siem Reap after a doctor’s visit in Bangkok. We had shared a 6-hour trip from Bangkok to the border, as well, though I had blended in well enough that she thought there weren’t any other foreigners on the bus. After the bus, I walked a dusty road through both countries’ immigration checks alone, arriving in a swarm of motorbikes and tuk tuks, that circled around me calling out “lady, lady, where you go?” It seemed like I was the only foreigner there. Then I noticed the Dutch woman speaking in Khmer to some local taxi drivers and gravitated towards her, working my way into a shared taxi, which happened to be a beat-up navy station wagon with a cracked windshield.

About an hour into the ride, rain starting falling in sheets across the rocky dirt road and lighting occasionally flashing across the road. Locals on bicycles and motorbikes moved slowly with their heads down. Our taxi fishtailed across the slick dirt and I tried not to look at the water on either side of road. Instead I talked with the Dutch woman and her increasingly chatty son. I found at that she was a pediatrician in Holland and had left to move to Cambodia, where she felt she could make a difference, to work at a Christian NGO.  In Holland, if you leave, there are a thousand other doctors to replace you.  It’s different here, she told me.

A resident since 2000, she also gave me a glimpse into the country’s corruption. All the taxis at the border have to pay off the police or else they get stopped over and over, which explained the seemingly high cost for transportation.  Her friend, who owns a small business selling village crafts, gets harassed every week by the police, but refuses to pay because then they’ll just come more often. Even teachers are forced into scamming the system. They get paid about $20-25/month, under living wages, so they only teach part of the lesson and charge students for the full lesson. This, of course, leaves the country’s poor trapped.

So there I sat, hungry and tired from a long day of traveling, but listening to this woman’s stories, eating my fishy pomelo and not regretting a missed plane ride one bit.