Pattaya to Aranyaprathet/Poipet to Siam Reap.

I was glad to leave the utter debauchery of Pattaya, into which I had so willingly and mindlessly plunged. My soul needed shrieving, I had never slept with so many different beautiful women in such a short space of time, but by the time I left I felt jaded and grey, soulless, in need of spiritual sustenance of some sort. I could not take another delightful body writhing enthusiastically beneath, above and over me. Cries of ecstasy, hers or mine, became like a monologue or a pale echo of true passion; if every night is filled with passion, then even passion becomes a dull mistress.

I slept fitfully on the early morning bus, most people there were doing a visa run - most tourist visas last 30 days, and you have to leave the country and come back in to get a new 30 day visa. Such people are invariably dull, sex tourists for the most, not that I could judge, for that too was what I had become.

The journey from Pattaya to Aranyaprathet is utterly unremarkable, just mile after mile of flat, uninspiring landscape, half finished roads and ugly connurbations.

As usual there was the fizz at the border. Beggars, urchins, ne'erdowells all hungrily eyeing your conspicuous wealth no matter how much you tried to conceal it. Offering parasols (mouldy old umbrellas) to protect you from the scorching midday sun, or to carry your rucksack for a few paltry baht, it doesn't seem unreasonable. But give them an inch and by damn they'll take a full foot. Many unaware or inexperienced people agree to their help and then they are usually mobbed by dozens of sharp, clever children, with hungry hands dipping in and out of every pocket and bag; this is when passports, wallets and money are relieved from the distracted tourist with a skilled and practiced efficiency that only the true artisan artful dodgers can demonstrate. Many are those that have queued at the border only to realise too late that they have no passport to present, suddenly persona non grata, their cunningly concealed security wallets tucked into their underpants vanished as surely as the mist on the burning dawn.

The companions in the exit queue are typically dull - I'd overstayed my visa by two days, because of some strange virus I'd picked up, and of course the scaremongers were at hand to explain at length the imprisonment, torture and financial reparations that I would inevitably suffer - the worst Jeremiah was a fat fellow Welshman who boded a deep and dark future for my cute little ass in the Bangkok Hilton. I'm always amazed at those that seek to cow others in these situations. There seems to be an inverse square law relationship between their perception of reality and yours. There's another breed of bore, those that insist that they alone can handle a situation, despite all evidence to the contrary. And they usually just end up making things worse until someone steps in and cleans up the irrational mess that they've made.

After being whisked throught the border point with barely a glance, I then sat down and waited for the bus that would take me to Siem Reap and the promising feast of Angkor Wat.

The Cambodian side of the border, Poipet, was instantly worse than the Thai side. It's hard to put your finger on it, but just 100 yards through the dead zone, a stamp on your passport to get into Cambodia, and you suddenly knew you were in a completely different territory. Not all borders are this starkly obvious in their contrast. Suddenly poverty is screaming at you in every dusty urchins face, there are amputees hopping around on crutches, there's a stench that outmatches Thailands finest. Odd looking tractors with front wheel drives, haul trailers of God knows what are matched by hand driven bicycles hauling what seems like an entire village and their tennis partners. Suddenly there is no road, just pot-holes and poverty and dust and a quiet desperation. Gambling is illegal in Thailand, and so enterprising Thais built casinos in Poipet, Cambodia to get past the difficulty. Poipet consists largely of casinos and brothels where sex slaves are chained to their beds to prevent them from escaping.

It was now full blown, blasting noon now, the bus wasn't due, if it arrived, until 2.00 a the earliest. I fell into conversation with Phil, a broken-vein faced Australian form somewhere north of Melbourne. He'd done the trip to Siem Reap a year earlier, and had decided to return, this time giving Angkor Wat more time than the paltry two day visit before. Phil was interesting, and like most Australians, unpretentious and urbane; we got on instantly. After about ten minutes we agreed to hire a taxi between us for about $10 rather than wait for the bus. Phil told me of the nightmare journey that he's endured by bus a year earlier. It had taken 10 hours from Poipet. Now this is remarkable simply because from border point it's just something like 200km. But that's assuming there's anything that even remotely resembles a road.

Which there isn't.

A dirt track would be being too kind,the truth is that the road is a potholed shambles. As we progressed, the wisdom of taking the taxi became apparent. A heavily laden mini-bus would have taken at least three times long, if it wanted its axles to survive. Phil pointed out the highlights of his last trip here, including the driver and his passengers having to 'build' a dirt ramp up to a bridge that had been washed away in a flash flood. Another three hours were lost when they had to repair a broken axle on the minibus halfway down the road. He regaled me with stories of some shifty companies running out of petrol and simply abandoning their passengers and leaving them to fend for themselves in the middle of this most peculiar of nowheres. That brought back memories of being dumped in Laos for the night when I and half a dozen others had to spend the night sleeping in the back of a truck.

Phils wisdom became apparent, thankfully the rainy season just hand't happened otherwise the road simple couldn't have been passable. The only other road that I can remember being as bad was on Zanzibar, as we headed from the Old Stone town to the beach to recover from the ordeal of scaling Kilimanjaro, Whisky route. As we bounced and jarred our way along the kidney smashing track, our teeth clicking with the violence of the transit, it was still possible to consider the passing landscapes.

Most of it was utterly flat, beautiful lime-green paddy fields that stretched into forever, with only the occasional lonely palm tree towering above the landscape. There appeared to be few people attending the fields, there appeared to be little demarcation, such as in Laos, just mile after mile of sublime lime beauty, peppered with brilliant lemon and black butterflies when we stopped to take a leak. The track gave way to a rich red mud, dusty and all pervasive, soon we were all coughing our guts out even while the road felt like someone was shoving a jackhammer up your arse. As we moved further towards Siem Reap, more trees and vegetaion began to line the road. The dark green complexion was masked by an odd red mascara, the dust from the road, it was eerily and almost etherially beautiful, odd and yet wondrous, an almost alien beauty marching mutely and stilly along with us as we pushed towards Siem Reap. Eventualy we arrived, Phil and I went our seperate ways, it had been an interesting journey, with tales swapped and our journeys reviewed, I bagged into the first hotel I saw, and had my first bath for well over three months. It was expensive, but worth every damned dollar.

yechydda,