Visa extension - Cambodia borderrun

During January we realized that we are already in Thailand for 5 months and it was almost time for our border run. So we booked our seat on the van with the same company that we did our visa run with.

The border run is a one day trip and you go to the Cambodian border. You leave from Tesco lotus next to the On Nut BTS station at 7 in the morning and return at about 16:00. Here is how our trip went down:

I was very excited since I got an off day from school and got to go to a new country and add another stamp in my passport. We got up very early the morning, packed a backpack full of snacks (‘n trip is nie ‘n trip sonder padkos nie…) and went down to the road to get a taxi. We missed all the traffic since it was about  5:30 in the morning and arrived VERY early at TESCO. Luckily there is a 24h McDonalds so we each grabbed a cup of WAKE-ME-UP coffee.

At 7 the van arrived and all the people had to wait for me – there is certain stuff that needs to happen in the morning okay… And my system does not care if I am on a tight time schedule. So I hopped into the van – Steven saved us nice seats in the front just behind the driver. These are the best seats since you have loads of leg space and the hopping around like popcorn in a tin can is minimized.

After about 3 hours of death-defying stunt driving done by our driver, we stopped at a random fuel station in the middle of no-where to fill up and smoke:

Then we were exposed to some more crazy Thai van driving and eventually ended up at the Cambodian border. The Cambodian border looks like a bad mix between Mexico, Zimbabwe and the Sun…

 It is quite an easy process to do the whole stamp thing. You queue to get your Thai visa cancelled, then walk over the bridge into Cambodia, hand your passport to a strange person together with 1800 baht, stress for about 2 hours, get your  passport back with a stamped Cambodian Visa, walk over the bridge, Thai visa stamped, DONE.

At the Cambodian side you wait at a place that they call a casino – it looks more like a Garage party gone wrong somewhere in the east of JHB – smoke hanging in the air, bad music playing, bottles of alcohol standing around and people that had too much exposure to sunlight hanging around. We opted to rather wait outside and see what we can buy at the duty free shops. And our efforts paid off when we saw that you can buy Marlboro for only 120 Baht a carton (R30 vir ‘n HELE doos sigarette). BARGAIN!! Until you smoke it and you realize that you just bought something filled with grass and a few donkie drolle of iets. It tasted horrible – and we had two cartons!!!

Anyhow we got our passports back, hopped in the van and started the insane journey back home. Nothing like a bit of Kamakazi style van driving to round off a trip to the barren land and back.