On Leaving Thailand: The Cambodian Border Run

I'm back at my apartment in Bangkok and as much as I enjoyed exploring the ancient, wild, impoverished and interesting nation of Cambodia, it's good to be home. It's kind of weird when you're new in a foreign land (I've been here two months now), and then you spend a couple days in a land that is even MORE foreign, being back to the first country gives you that comfortable feeling of being 'home' that up until now, I haven't had.

It’s good to be ‘home’, as it were.

Some observations about the first part of my trip and some points to look for in the video: 

1.   If anyone at my employment agency or school happen to be reading this, thank you very much for letting me leave school early on Friday to make the trip to the border (although making sure all my paperwork is in order is one the main roles of the agency).  This whole weekend would have been so different if I had been forced to leave on Saturday morning instead. 
 

2.   I talk about needing to pick up a few things in Thailand before heading into Cambodia.  The irony there is that just a couple months ago, I was doing the same thing but with America being the country where I knew I could get certain things and Thailand being the great unknown.  Cambodia makes Thailand
 look absolutely First World.  

3.   You might know about Cambodia’s tragic history in the 1970’s where some 2 million people were murdered by an insane regime.  Everything fell apart in Cambodia at that time, and the legacy of that devastation continues to today.  Look for the collapsed rail bridge at 1:51 in the video.  Thailand and Cambodia used to be connected by railroad.  It’s been 30 years since the bridge you’ll see connected anything. 

4.   In my post about the Chanburi trip two weeks ago, I described how I love travel, but am really bad at planning it.  I don’t know if remembering to bring an umbrella cancels out not looking up exactly where my hotel was (down the road on the left, is what it looked like on the map), but the umbrella didn’t do that much good in the kind of rain I ended up in.  I was only 85% soaked instead of 100%. 

5.   On my little walk in the rain, two prostitutes pulled over to the side of the road and offered to give me a ride on their motorcycle.  I’m sure they were just doing it out of the goodness of their heart, seeing this poor Farang walking down the road in the rain. When I gave them the name of my hotel and asked if it was further down or back the way I came, they didn’t know, but they were willing to take me there anyways.  How different the weekend might have turned out had I accepted that ride. 

6.   The hotel I booked online at Agoda.com was the only hotel I can ever remember staying at which had a complimentary condom in the nightstand drawer.  I ended up not using it, but I took it with me as a souvenir. 

Enjoy the video!  Music by a little band you might of heard of called The Beatles.