From the Jungle to the Temple

It was a tough call working out how we got from our jungle paradise to Dumai,  the nearest city we could catch a ferry to Malaysia from, and fifteen hours south of where we were.

The only public transport we could find was a bus, a twelve hour overnighter from Medan. We had searched hard but not found any way to book tickets online, and we couldn’t figure out where the buses went from either.

…and then there were the reviews.

‘Clinging to my seat fearing for my life!’ ‘Driving so fast he couldn’t have stopped if he’d wanted to!’ ‘He did a twelve hour journey in 8.5 hours…’ ‘Where oh where are the seatbelts?’

Never have I wanted to catch a bus less.

So our plan, which nearly worked really well, was to take the lift our trekking guide Joe provided to Bohorok, the nearest town to Batu Katak. Then catch a bus to Medan, get a GRAB to the southern bus terminal and see how far we could get during the daylight hours…there had to be some buses headed south right?

Then, wherever we got to, we could order a taxi for the rest of the way. It would cost more than the overnight bus, but what price life?

We got as far as Medan, and at the bus station (where according to the blogs we had read, everyone had a knife and was going to steal our stuff) a very sweet elderly gentleman, who looked a little Chinese, was propelled towards us. The local citizens of the bus station had chosen him to be our taxi driver to take us to the southern bus terminal. He looked so little like a knife wielding thug that we said yes straight away – he spoke little English but we used iTranslate and I explained that we were trying to get to Dumai. He rang someone to check for us where the bus went from and if there was a daytime bus.

He was so kind and considerate, gently thoughtful and a great driver, that when he stopped outside a bus ticket office/repair shop, we did what he suggested and went straight in to see what the deal was.

We walked past a 50 seater bus being repaired. It looked like it had had a pretty big crash on the front wing, and the welding sparks and fumes were pretty overwhelming …and yes, this might have been the moment when the penny dropped and we thought better of our imminent course of action, but, what a crashed bus said about the quality of the driving completely failed to register with us.

We walked calmly into the air conditioned office.

I’s amazing how reassuring a counter is – the two women behind it asked if we wanted an ‘economy’ or ‘super’ bus – well ‘super’ sounded good …and it was less than half the money of the taxi to take us all the way to Dumai, plus we’d save the cost of a hotel!

Yep, sign us all up for a twelve hour overnight bus journey please…

We sat in the waiting room, slightly in shock.

How had that happened? Were we really going on a twelve hour overnight bus journey without seatbelts …through some pretty interesting jungle terrain?

We didn’t talk about it – we’d already paid for the tickets – seduced by the ‘super’ seats. Angkor Wat better be worth it I muttered grimly, but the others weren’t listening – Rosa playing a game on her phone and Theo reading news reports.

Why had we decided to go to Cambodia again? …and then I remembered this one had been my idea.

Ellie had been to Angkor Wat in 2003 as part of a round the world trip and she had loved it, ‘the jungle and the ruined temples are stunning sis,’ she had said ‘really one of the best places we visited in the whole ten months’.

Her enthusiasm had lived with me all this time and we were going to be so close – were we up for it?

Rosa and Theo went online and had a look…’Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument in the world’, well that was interesting…and ‘Angkor was the largest ever pre-industrial city, home to between 750,000 and 1,000,000 people.’ …also interesting, but what made them want to go though were the beautiful pictures, temples being reclaimed by the jungle conjures something for the imagination…

So here we were, about to get on the bus, the next leg in an ‘overnight bus, ferry, taxi, hotel, train, overnight train, third class train, tuk-tuk, overnight bus, tuk-tuk marathon.

These temples better be properly overgrown.

…after a while I decided I’d go and look for somewhere to change money so we didn’t arrive in Malaysia with nothing.

I sweated three kilos on that walk – was it nervous tension or the fact that it was a very hot day? My muscles were sore from the intense ‘up’ during the jungle trek and I was walking alongside a mega busy dual carriageway, in the most dangerous town in Sumatra (according to one blog and a power ballad singing taxi driver).

Rosa and I have had a cough since we left Jakarta so my lung capacity is feeling a bit compromised …I don’t know why I found it so hard but I arrived at the money changing place feeling like I’d run a marathon rather than walked three miles.

The man behind the counter took one look at the state of me and put a fan on.

After a while I felt able to get to the business of changing money – he offered me an okay rate but when the price changed between handing over my Rupiah and receiving my Ringits I wasn’t having any of it. I might be knackered and sweaty but this was pushing it too far, I could see the guy at the front desk was feeling awkward about what his boss had done so I didn’t flounce out …and he had put a fan on for me, but I was changing nearly a million rupiah (£50) and I had my pride! I headed back out into the heat, and turned left up the road, further away from the bus station.

I knew there was another money changing place nearby …and thankfully it was cool inside.

Not only was it blissfully cool but they gave me the actual exchange rate, higher than both rates offered by the first guy.

I had made (or not lost) twice what it cost me to get a GRAB back to the bus station, and I suspect I wouldn’t have made it if I had tried to walk.

When I got back Rosa and I went looking for snacks to eat on the the bus and then it was time for the big ‘all aboard.’

Was it the bus they’d been repairing when we first arrived? If it was they’d done a great repair job very quickly.

The inside of the bus was really quite plush, lots less seats and way more space for each person than on your average greyhound bus, plus a lovely thick blanket and a pillow each. The leg rest came all the way up to horizontal as well which meant we could sit cross legged some of the time.

The drivers assistant came round and gave us all a bottle of water and then he and the driver did some kind of religious blessing that looked suspiciously like the last rites to me…not very reassuring!

(They could just been telling us where and how often we were going to stop and where the toilet was located …my Indonesian isn’t great…)

We set off just as it was getting dark and the unremarkable suburbs of Medan meandered by (clearly hiding an underbelly of seething criminal activity).

Our first driver took it nice and steady in the city, his music choice was ‘Country & Western’ which went very well with his driving style – ‘mostly quite relaxed but with the odd wild swaying motion’, where the whole bus would lean one way and then the other (as the emotion of a particular song transported him was my guess).

Our second driver had a very different musical taste. He took over at midnight and maybe he thought about turning the music off in the sleeping section, there was a door between him and us after all, but no, he wanted to share his tunes.

It was like the music you get on an irritating video game – high pitched, intense, fast and monotonous – on and on and on and on and on…

We thought it was some heartless bastard playing a game on his phone  for a while but everyone was asleep around us (how?!) – it had to be the driver.

Respite from the music came in the form of a couple of stops for food. We experimented with packets of things that looked like doughnut balls and sugary corn chips…both tasted like, well, doughnut balls and sugary corn chips, nearly food…

We didn’t sleep much, the ‘music’ saw to that, but we weren’t terrified, the second driver was a bit more ‘razzy’ than the first but not dangerous, and so the journey passed.

The only ferry to Malaysia left at nine the next morning and I could see we were going to arrive late, over an hour in the end, but Dumai wasn’t a large city and because GRAB is so fab we were being whisked towards the port just as our feet stepped off the bus.

The kind port officials let us off 7,000 rupiah for port tax because we only had 68,000 (it was only 35p but that could have been a big pain for us).

The ferry journey was smooth and Theo and Rosa watched the Indonesian subtitled version of Aqua Man while I stared at the ocean and watched some medium sized silver fish hurl themselves out of the water…and then behave exactly like skimming stones! Leaping out of the water again and again, it looked like a lot of effort – why were they doing it, some up to eight ‘skims’ in a row?

Indonesian and Malaysian immigration were straight forward and although we were tired we were doing okay…we had one day in Malaysia now before we headed to Cambodia.

That leg was a two day journey into the hottest weather we’d faced yet.

Forty degrees.

Our ferry arrived into Melacca, the previous capital of a huge empire 700 years ago, but our train was leaving from a station in the much smaller town of Tampin so we booked a hotel there. We asked our taxi driver about the place and he told us it was ‘nothing special’, which was perfect for us.

A town that was set up for the residents not for tourists was exactly what we wanted. People were still warm and friendly, but they didn’t rely on us for their livelihood. We stashed our stuff in our hotel room and headed up the high street.

We had a great meal of chappatis with an Indian sauce and fried rice, sitting with the locals looking out into the street. We bought bits of food and some ear drops for Rosa, whose ear had been blocked for a couple of days, and the day passed quietly.

The most notable thing that happened the whole day was a dog taking a dump in the middle of the road. I felt some sympathy for him, there had been some times for me since Jakarta when there really hadn’t been much warning…

Our train left at 8.37 the next morning, taking us the 630 km to the border town of Pedang Besar where we’d cross from Malaysia to Thailand and catch our overnight train to Bangkok. Our walk to the train station ended up being the most stressful part of the day…’the suitcase’ had to be held at an exact 15 degree angle or part of the wheel casing dragged on the ground making a hideous noise and threatening to pull the wheels off.

We all took it in turns, trying to get it right, but our pointed looks and helpful suggestions to each other every time ‘the noise’ was heard was not a great way to start the day.

We all wanted to throw the suitcase and its contents into a ditch by the time the station was in sight but decided there was bound to be something in it we needed.

When we got onto the platform we decided to try for one last repair. We had string, and I reckoned if we tied the wheel casing to the handle it might hold…and blissfully ‘the noise’ stopped. No idea if we would still be wheeling this piece of junk when we got off the train at Castle Cary, my money was on ‘no’ but it wasn’t going to break completely in the next five minutes at least.

Both our train journeys went smoothly – trains arriving roughly on time and the upper bunks just about accessible (which, let’s face it, we were used to by now).

Our food options were a bit grim and we ate a lot of crackers with peanut butter and New Zealand marmite (thanks again Tracey). We had bought some fresh mangos in Tampin though which were delicious… and when you are hungry slightly sweet crackers with marmite are a whole load better than nothing.

We had a four hour wait in Bangkok before we got on our third class train to the Cambodian border …and then somehow we had to find a bus to Siem Reap, our final destination. The info online said it would be easy – there would be ‘a uniformed person there to help tourists find their way to the international bus station’ …there were loads of people in uniforms at all the borders we’d crossed in Asia, how were we meant to find the bus person? …maybe they’d find us, westerners with more bags than sense, we were quite obvious…

The four hours between our two trains gave us time to navigate the Bangkok underground system, helped by a sweet Buddhist man called ‘Bank’ who had been sleeping in our compartment on the train. He guided us all the way, through the maze that is Krung Thep Aphiwat station, helping us find the right line and buy the tokens to be able to get on the train. He had the best giggle and was really gentle with us…thank you Bank x

We filled up on pastries in the new station; coconut, pineapple and chocolate varieties. We drank fruit smoothies and waited, we’re quite good at waiting now.

I went for a stroll about an hour before the train was due to leave and on the way back noticed our train was already on the platform – we grabbed our stuff, spoke gently to the suitcase who agreed to cooperate with us, and climbed on board what was already a pretty full train.

Rosa and I sat together and Theo found a space at the other end of the carriage.

One of the joys of third class travel is there is not actually enough room for your legs. If all four of you sit facing each other in your seating bit you have to negotiate who puts what knee and what foot where…manageable for an hour, bloody hard work for five!

We endured the heat and the dust, we endured the overcrowding, we endured the noise and the train being late, arriving at dusk and making it just that bit harder to navigate the border…but when the seat I was sitting in actually broke and I hurtled towards the floor I came close to a meltdown – it wasn’t really embarrassing because everyone had pretty much got off the train before the final stop…it didn’t even hurt very much – it was shocking mostly. Which way was I going to go – screaming ab dabs or hysterical laughter?! Could my over extended endurance muscles see the funny side?

…after nearly six hours on a train in searing heat ending up in a crumpled heap on the floor? …turns out I think it’s funny!

Rosa took a photo of me and my collapsed seat and then she hauled me up off the floor and we got off the train and went to Cambodia…our 21st country.

Immigration took ages and we hadn’t printed out our evisa’s – I’d printed other ones in the past, just in case, but mostly they hadn’t been necessary.

In Cambodia they wanted printed versions.

My visa had only come through on the train through Malaysia so there had been no chance of finding a printing shop anyway…

It took a while to navigate but one of the officials printed a copy for us and we were in, off to find the uniformed official to help us get a bus to Siem Reap.

We ended up on a rickshaw going to a bus station close by. The guy who helped us was a decent enough person and we didn’t have any other plans. My phone wasn’t working for booking a grab and the only uniform on this street was t-shirt, shorts and flip flops so we took his help gratefully.

The bus he took us too was an overnight sleeper that supposedly got in at 11.00 pm – the ticket man wanted $15 each.

Cambodia works in three currency’s – its own, Riels, Thai Bhat, and also in American Dollars. Proper fun for maths geeks …but this one was easy. We knew what the price of the bus should be and whichever currency that price was in, he was charging $6 each over the odds.

Two of the people we’d been queuing with in immigration arrived in another tuk tuk. Ten minutes of haggling had not gotten us far but now with five of us we had enough buying power to get the price back to roughly what it should be, $10 each.

The bus itself was actually brilliant. It had beds in it…flat beds with mattresses and after 36 hours of travel it was really nice to lie down : )

We all dosed a bit, after a feast of crackers, peanut butter and marmite, and the bus glided through the completely flat lands between the border and Siem Reap.

We arrived at 12.15 and texted our hotel. They had said they would come and get us when we arrived, even if it was really late…but they didn’t reply, or answer the phone. After twenty minutes we turned the new eSIM back on and checked if we had enough signal to order a GRAB – yep, our new best friends in all the world, eSIM’s  that work and taxis that come within two minutes.

The hotel wasn’t marked on our map so we’d put a nearby cafe as our drop off point and hoped we’d be able to recognise it when we got close.

…luckily Rosa found it really easily, we weren’t fit for much at 1.00 in the morning.

The lobby was clean and on the reception desk was a sign saying ‘Welcome Shannon Coggins’ – we were in the right hotel (…or it was an unbelievable coincidence) – I could see the list of who was in which room and my name was next to 105, the key was on the desk so we helped ourselves and went to bed!

We had planned, as we have learned to do, to give ourselves a days rest after long stretches of travel. Gone are the days of arriving late at night and getting up the next morning to rush off to a mountain/temple/jungle/ to see the sunrise (well, mostly gone..), we needed to mooch about, feel what the new place we were in was like, eat some food, buy some fruit for lunch – lie down and do nothing.

…and figure out the best way to see the magnificence that is Angkor Wat, the 8th wonder of the world!

We always think those days are going to be chill but they always get partially hijacked because the other thing we need those days for is ‘planning’. We needed Lao evisa’s (better print those out when they come through) and a way to get from Chiang Mai (North Thailand) to Luang Prabang (central Laos). The sleepers were all booked up so we considered travelling by bus, another twelve hour overnighter, but Thailand was properly high up in the all time worst drivers list…what to do?

My cousin let us know it was New Year the weekend we’d be leaving and getting on a bus during Thai New Year (Songkran) was like signing your own death warrant…literally the first thing I read made my blood run cold.

‘…some bus companies overwork their drivers, who often fall asleep while driving’

Often?!

I would have thought falling asleep once would be enough.

Add to this ‘rave review’ the fact that we were travelling during Songkran where the country has what are known locally as the ‘seven deadly days’. The death toll from road accidents rises dramatically during these days.

No! Not The Bus.

Back to the train booking app. The only availability was third class for ten hours then a four hour wait followed by a twelve hour journey sitting upright overnight …then a three hour bus journey, an hour long local bus journey, a high speed train across the border and a thirty minute tuk-tuk…

Sounded like a flippin’ triathlon to me but we knew that the buses were not an option…’often fall asleep!!’

Planning finished for now we went downstairs and met Mr Bee Sophorn who offered to be our guide and driver for the next two days – wonderful!

He had a brilliant system for seeing the temples, he had colourful laminated maps and interesting facts about each temple…and we liked him. He helped organise us which I think was a relief for us all.

This afternoon he would take us all to the ticket office to get our photo ID entry tickets, and then tomorrow morning we needed to be up at 5.00 a.m. to see the sunrise over Angkor Wat, he would organise breakfast for us.

That sounded perfect to us…and now? It was time to go and eat some more mangoes.