Day 78 - Taxi to Bangkok

Woke up today at 6 am and packed my stuff and went to the market for some fruit for the journey to Poipet to cross the border into Thailand. We were to picked up at 7 am but when we arrived at 6:40 back at the guesthouse, the driver was already there. We got into the taxi and waited for the third passenger to arrive. At 7:10 she never arrived so we left only to find her waiting outside the travel agents. We passed her on the way out of the hotel when we got into the cab. So weird.

The ride was ridiculously bumpy and I'm happy I took a dramamine for nausea and it put me to sleep for most of the trip there. I couldn't believe the ride was as good as it was since most people have horror stories about it. i think the main thing was that I took a taxi instead of a bus. The taxi is smaller and can manoeuvre around potholes better than a bus can. It would have been horrible to take the bus. Not only would it have been bumpier, I would have had to wait for the entire bus at each rest stop and at the border crossing. It would have taken forever. Taking the taxi was worth it for $13.

The taxi was quite interesting though. It was an older Toyota corolla like i used to have. The driver didn't speak any English and was a speed demon. At one point I looked at the speedometer to see how fast we were going only to realize it was at 0 km because it was broken. He was definitely booting it though. There was also a weird intermittent smell of cow crap and we couldn't figure out where it was coming from as we didn't see any cows anywhere. As the ride progressed we released it was the smell of the driver's breath as we could only smell it when he was talking on his cellphone! It was hilarious but absolutely disgusting at the same time. How can someone not know their breath smells that bad?

It took 3 1/2 hours to get to the Poipet border crossing and the driver promptly dropped us off. The crossing didn't take long and was not hassle at all. To walk across "no man's land" into Thailand took about 10 minutes. From there we took a tuk tuk to the Aranya Prathet to get bus to Bangkok. This bus took about 4 1/2 hours. As we passed the closed airport there was evidence of the civil unrest. There were makeshift barricades everywhere made of things like used tires and shopping carts piled high and barbed wire was strewn everywhere. I'm not sure when they are going to reopen the airport.