The road from Bangkok was difficult due to the conditions that were being created around. Thai music screamed at full volume. When we began to drive closer to the border, people began to come in and fill the bus in the aisle, somehow it wasn’t very nice to drive when black Thais or people from Cambodia are standing above you. When we drove through a city, the police inspected the bus and took out more than half of the people, in our opinion they were Cambodian illegal immigrants. Well, the ride has become easier, we go further in anticipation of the border. The police checked the bus again and we soon drove up to the Thai city, which is located near the border. We were dropped off at the bus station, from there we need to get to the border itself, which is located a bit further at the exit from the country. And then it started! Comrades be careful Cambodian border is a complete divorce. I paint how to go through it:
After you have been dropped off at the train station, they will offer you a tuk-knock (25 baht / person) before the so-called "immigration service", where they will give you a CAMBODIAN visa, no one even thinks that you have not left Thailand. You will be brought to the office where there will be different inscriptions like: visa ... And so on. You can apply for a visa there, but it will cost you $ 47 minimum, despite the fact that it costs $ 20. You are brought to the immigration service, where they will rip money off without thinking.
They will begin to assure you that you have arrived where you need to, but you should turn around and move on, you will pass the temple on the left side, pass a long "road-corridor"
which leads to the building, which put a stamp on the exit, this
View of the Cambodian side
Almost all Cambodians cross the border harnessed to their carts. They go to Thailand every morning and return with shopping. As we later learned, they themselves are harnessed to carts because motorcycles and animals cannot be transported across the border, which is why they found such a way out.
This is how wicker products travel from Cambodia to Thailand
Many Thais travel to Cambodia to play casinos, since this type of game is prohibited in Thailand. As soon as you go abroad Thailand hotels with casinos will surprise you, they are everywhere !!
There they can start to breed you for all kinds of quarantine passes, even they manage a card for you, everything is official and everything is for an additional fee. Of course, this is not necessary, do not believe it. And also be sure to take with myselfthey will need photographs for a visa, if there are no photographs with you, then you can make them somewhere on the spot, but very expensive.
After you leave the building, the divorce does not end! Local guys will pester you with offers to take you to the office, where they put a stamp on arrival, without waiting in line. As a rule, a queue is going there, but in our case the queue was not large at 6-10 people. We quickly stamped our arrival and here we are officially in Cambodia.
so we arrived in Cambodia
In order to get to Siem Reap (where Angkor Wat is located) you need to take a free bus that will take you to the bus station, where you can buy a ticket for yourself. You can take a regular bus with air conditioning for $ 9, a minibus with air conditioning, as in our case, for $ 11 per person.
Be attentive if you face the building with the ticket offices in the left extreme ticket office, they are 11 dollars each, but they can also charge you 12 dollars, this is what happened to some people from our bus, or you can take a taxi for 4 people for 12 dollars / person. Drive to Siem Reap 2.5 hours.
Here Max agrees with other tourists to pick up people in a minibus, the driver put forward the condition that he goes if there are 10 people. As a result, 12 people went.
Our ticket to Siem Reap
As we read on the Internet later, everyone also has a divorce. This free bus takes you to its ticket offices, and if you go further than the border on foot, you will find local companies' offices there, where the price will be 2 times cheaper.
We are moving to a hotel called "side walk cofe hotel", in which Dan and Christina are waiting for us. We are on the road, it would be more likely to come and take a shower, it is very hot here, you will not be disturbed by a small towel or scarf, it really saves me!
Thirtieth day. Our move to Thailand! At 7:30 we already stood at the reception of our hotel and waited for us to be picked up at the bus station. In Siem Reap, when you buy bus tickets, the price includes a tuk-tuker who picks you up from the hotel and takes you to the bus station. There you board the bus. Tickets cost us $ 22 for two.
We drove to the border for 3 hours, no more. There we were asked to go out, sticking on some identification badges, pieces of red scotch tape with numbers written with the marker “P4”, “P1”. The feeling is strange, the ticket was withdrawn on the bus on the border with Cambodia, the number is pasted on, I go there, the Thai shows my hand, I don’t know where, stories from Auschwitz surfaced in my head, there too people with things were sent there. We went to cross the border. There were no problems with Cambodia, they asked about us to show an air ticket that proved that we were going to leave Thailand.
With the Thai side got out a couple of nuances. Firstly, for a visa you always need a return ticket! Secondly, you need to have a photo with you, since there they will offer to make it for $ 25, 4 things. Thirdly, it is MANDATORY to change money in front of the border! If in dollars, then a visa is $ 10 more expensive due to poor exchange rates! We forgot to change the money, and after much debate, we had to pay $ 40 for a visa. The border took us about 3 hours. By the way, in the queue I managed to lose my number, though a beautiful girl, in my opinion, an Englishwoman, returned it to me. Gave it to me with frightened eyes and with instructions that I should be more careful, this piece of scotch tape is important for me, at that moment I was even more dumbfounded, as if I were crossing the border, what was there on the side? There was a question in my head)))
After going through all the lines and checkpoints, we finally got to the next bus. And then the fun began! Since in Thailand you are taken from the border by minivan, there is not enough room in them.
We were offered to pay extra for an extra seat for our luggage and there were not many options: either you pay and you go, or you don’t pay and you don’t go. There were times when people paid, but the minivan left without them. Such he is, this is Thailand ... Of course, there were some screams. Nastya began to explain with the carrier that we took tickets for large buses and that we warned about luggage. But the driver really does not care. He suggested that we go to Cambodia and deal with the company from which we bought ...
Realizing that it was useless to prove something, we began to bargain. With $ 6 for an extra seat, we knocked down the price of $ 4. As a result, they did not regret it a bit! Since we were seated in the front three places and there was enough space, and the rest were sitting on each other’s heads ... But the process of spinning people up for money drank me. A hunch about the numbers was not in vain a "numbered walking wallet."
As a result, the number is hung up so that the company that will breed you, but I was not mistaken not to distribute it, namely to divorce you, if you lose the number, then the price of the divorce will be a new ticket and it does not matter what you paid, you were listed under the last name etc.! The main thing in this process is not to strain, because you can’t change it, so you need to lead it, with a smile and slightly prepared phrases, saying that you are not a printing press for money and can offer a lower amount. We have a ride)))
After 4 hours on the road, we arrived in Pattaya. After Cambodia, Pattaya made a strong impression with its development. A large metropolis with developed infrastructure and a huge number of Russian inscriptions at restaurants, bars and travel agencies. When you walk along the promenade, you get the impression that you are in Sochi or Yalta. It seems that there are more Russians in Pattaya than Thais, but this is not so! Most of all the above, the Chinese, they are just everywhere and a lot)).
They settled in a hotel, which they found right on the go, although they really wanted to find it via the Internet. It’s not worthless; there are a lot of housing options and it’s easier to find the area where you want to get there and take a taxi there, and there, in a half-hour walk, find what suits you, or on a recommendation that will greatly simplify your life.
We walked a bit along the promenade and left to sleep after a exhausting road.
To summarize:
- When traveling from the border of Cambodia, with Siem Reap, in the direction of tai, you don’t need to take heavy things, since there is passport control on the Thai border for foreigners on the second floor, but there is no elevator. You have to drag bags up and then down)))
- You need Baht, so as not to overpay for a visa, in Baht it costs one thousand for 15 days, and $ 40 in dollars, which is 1344bat at the normal rate.
- Be sure to take a photo, well, very expensive $ 25 for 4 photos)))
- A good mood, it will help to steer the smile and deceitfulness of Thais.
- All prices called with honest eyes should be knocked down at least in two, but it is important to do this with the same smile at 32 and the confidence that you know the real price. Like, it was a good joke, but come on two times lower. Most often, you will fall in price 😉
- Take water, a large bottle. Otherwise, the price at the border rises exponentially due to the fact that you are white. And they can change right before your eyes.
- Oh yes, what else is this border famous for, in the dutifree zone, there are huge hotels and casinos. Such a mini Las Vegas, not belonging to any country in the world.
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... In the early morning we started loading our belongings and bodies into an SUV that we hired as an interstate, by the way, taxi. Attached rather to the grave Viktorolexeysich rather than to the dull wrinkled us, the employees of our cozy hearty smiled at last and wished all luck. At least, I was so imagined, for there was no way to understand their emotional twittering in a still alien, to my shame, Thai.
Brushing away the stingy tears of parting, we smiled at our fairies of purity in the condominium, sorted out the twin and bougainvilleas and began to roll out from Pattaya towards Cambodia in the air-conditioning chill. We had to enjoy the journey for 9 hours.
How to get from Pattaya to Cambodia
To the melancholy sounds of Russian rock, the selection of which I so inadvertently approved aloud at the very beginning. For already by the middle of the way, the dynamics in the car broke out with such, slightly frightening people, sounds of mu:
The journey went smoothly and smoothly. The driver and our companion, sitting in front, were desperate for small talk, jumping with terrible speed from those of the jewelry business on a global scale to the rainy season in Cambodia. When there was absolutely nothing to talk about, as usual, we switched to gadgets.
Alekseyviktorovich and I modestly kept silent, turning our eyes all the way, looking thoughtfully out the window of the jeep. Viktorolexeyevich slept halfway, half jumped around the cabin, another third thoughtfully sucked his chest and only at the end he expressed his dissatisfaction with the many hours of inactivity with a characteristic deafening exclamation. The crew driver was very upset by the latter, but such is his karma - to carry all kinds of annoying passengers.
A pair of "Shershavins", which remembered the path of Pattaya - Sihanoukville, still happened.
1. The border of Thailand and Cambodia
As experienced farangs and barangas guessed, we crossed the border in the area of \u200b\u200bthe Thai city of Trat, the border checkpoint Cham Yeam - this way to Sihanoukville from Pattaya is two times shorter than through the Aranyaprathet-Poipet border. Cham Yeam is less popular than the second option. I do not know if this is due to a hitch for 20 minutes when passing through passport control at the exit from the Kingdom of Thailand.
Border officials were interested in the virgin clean passport of Viktorolexeyevich and who had never left the country before. In this regard, the document did not have a single stamp about entry or exit to the Land of Smiles or any other. The border guards examined the birth certificate of a Thai sample for a long time, removed it from their passports and pasted copies of themselves somewhere, wrote down something, asked me something like whether it was my direct descendant.
As many law-abiding people have emphasized, I am often inexplicably nervous when passing any boundaries. After about five minutes, the hitch already began to bite her nails, but another 10 minutes passed, and the Thais nevertheless slapped a stamp about leaving in the children's passport. True, something was signed by hand under the seal. Perhaps among my readers there will be enlightened Thai scholars who are not too lazy to translate this script.
The contrast between Pattaya and Cambodia
And this memory was imprinted on my memory card with iron durability, and I can never forget how Cambodia, already seen this time, was revealed to me in a new way ...
Overcoming the path from Pattaya to Sihanoukville, besides such a domesticated one, it was necessary to cross three more provinces - Rayong, Chanthaburi and Trat. The first three hours, the views outside the window were almost Thai typical: lush palm trees, shops at every intersection, roads creaked to a creak, large supermarkets, civilized gas stations with shining cleanliness and worthy of expensive SPA salons, roadside restrooms. Everything is as usual: bright, magnificent, rich. Not even so - in Bohatom, in Thai.
Sihanoukville met with rains
In Trat, the landscapes and exteriors of houses began to change subtly. The former with their mountains slightly resembled the nature of Krabi, from the latter it blew French rolls, vignettes and curls. Cambodia is nearby!
Located to the conversation, an experienced barang, our driver named Gleb inspiredly said that once the province of Trat belonged to Cambodia, and the Thais recently shamelessly “squeezed” it from their meek neighbors. And that right in front of the border we drove through the narrowest piece of land belonging to Thailand: between the mountains of Cambodia on the one hand and the Gulf of Thailand - on the second, there is a layer from the Land of Smiles only 50 meters wide.
All this is interesting, but my mind stirred up something else. If someone had told me before that a non-existent interstate border could separate two countries with different nature, smell and atmosphere, I would have smiled condescendingly. But here I myself was a sentimental young lady, because the following came out.
Sihanoukville's beaches are beautiful, but a little gloomy now
We drove out of Thailand with its impenetrable jungle and serenely subequatorial nature and ended up in Cambodia - also a subequatorial country, but with dramatically different landscapes. Air, mountains, forests, roads, people - everything is like the same Thailand but a little different. I will not bore my patient readers with details, and I will write a separate article about this contrast, for my imagination and verbosity have no limits, and we only have a brief report on the move for those closest and sympathetic.
Our journey ended as peacefully as it began. Sihanoukville, Ekarichi Street, the home-office of our significant friends (they are significant, at least, because we met Aleksey Viktorovich with their light hands), a carefully prepared dinner of local sea fish and an unusually cool guest.
Tomorrow's minimum program included renting a motorbike, express search and moving from hospitable friends. About our new ones in a real Khmer village with beautiful hair-dying cows, and - in the following posts ...
With wishes, it is just as easy to change countries and cities of residence, not to be mortally attached to permanent residence sincerely yours, migrating graphomaniac, Marta.
Three hours later we were in Aran. The minibus lands on a noisy border market, and you immediately find yourself in the center of events. An incredible amount of action takes place around you: merchants drag fruit on carts loaded so that you cannot even see the wheels; someone is poking around in the garbage exuding a frantic stench; immediately the women puff with simple food and motorcycles scurry around. Life is in full swing, and you are right at its epicenter.
Tourist Thailand, which many of our compatriots managed to visit, it must be said, is such a "refined" Asia. I remember the cultural shock that I experienced when I first appeared in these places - in Ceylon. I won’t talk about Myanmar either: I don’t know how it is now, but then there was a real untouched country. This is not so in Thailand. There are decent roads, a relatively high standard of living and a developed economy. All Asian attributes, whether it’s street food, numerous markets, metropolitan slums, the bustle of the streets, are present, but in Phuket, Bangkok and Pattaya regions they are more like scenery, and you get used to them quickly. But in the border Aran, everything is real. Already just getting off the bus, you feel that on the other side of the border will be even more interesting.
From the market to the border crossing just five minutes on foot. You will not be mistaken with the direction: there goes an endless stream of people. There is even a pointer “to the border”, the authenticity of which, having read stories about the Aranyaprathet border guards, at first doubted, but it turned out to be even true. First, you will walk along a long covered corridor and climb into the Thai border control building, where they will put a stamp on your departure from Thailand. And then the fun begins.
Kampuchea A small country that starts right behind the border landmarks.
I had to cross enough land borders, serious and not very. On the Belarusian-Polish border near Brest, I once spent several hours waiting. On the Serbian-Montenegrin I saw a checkpoint in the form of a painted change house with a huge Serbian tricolor on a wooden stick. In Turkish-Bulgarian for a long time they clamored with questions about visas and invitations. In the Ukrainian-Romanian one, complete chaos reigned and it seemed that even an elephant could have been discreetly ... But everywhere and always at the land crossings there was first exit control, then entry control over some distance. Yes, in rare cases, the exit and entry were combined under one roof, but you will never pass or pass by anyway.
In Cambodia, everything is different. After Thai control, the traveler immediately enters the Cambodian city of Poipet. No neutral stripes or other familiar border attributes. Now they are selling fried chicken and grasshoppers in batter. Children fervently throw some garbage, adults scurry back and forth - chaos reigns around. There is practically no through traffic between Thailand and Cambodia, but people are wandering endlessly across the border.
Our Czech fellow travelers, having received a visa in the window of the Cambodian immigration, which was not far from the border barrier, already, were rushing to leave for Sim Reap without a stamp on entry. But we had visas from Moscow, and I was embarrassed that no one even checked them. I went to find out from the immigration officers where the Cambodian control is, and if we had not passed it inadvertently before. The officer smiled and said, “You need a stamp.” Already good, thanks "cap", but I would like to know where do we put this same stamp. The officer extensively showed somewhere in the distance into the leaving street full of merchants and called, and advised me to look to the right after a hundred or two hundred meters. We headed there.
Life around is getting bigger. We are already making our way through some spontaneous market, where they just don’t sell, and people who don’t want to put us a stamp on entering the country are still not observed. At that moment I remembered reading blogs on Latin American borders that there, they say, a border guard with a stamp can sit in a booth a kilometer from the border crossing and wait for hours to wait for a foreigner who needs this stamp. And then I began to take everything I saw as a checkpoint. We walked past a greasy table, at which two men in uniform sat. “Here he is, the winner of my ranking of the most gouging borders of the world”, already, it was, I thought, but no. People in uniform again gestured to walk further down the street. Finally, on a canopy I saw a small sign announcing that stamps were being placed here. A dusty semi-open room, right on the sidewalk. A few windows, and an officer issuing migration cards. The broken fingerprint scanners looked there as if they arrived from another world. Now we have officially crossed the border and can move on. Despite warnings from the Internet, crossing the border took no more than an hour, there were no queues anywhere. I think time played a role here - we arrived at the border at about three in the afternoon, when the main tourist flow had already subsided.
A little distance from the control windows are already on duty taxi drivers who are ready to take to Sim Rip. Prices range from $ 35 to $ 40 per car. If there is no time and the taxi driver offers to breed directly to hotels, then we can agree. The main thing is that you are not divorced before being offered to breed hotels. If you have time, you can walk a couple of hundred meters inland and try to leave for $ 25-30 per car. They will ask for money in advance, do not agree, they can specially lead the wrong way. As a rule, taxi drivers in Sim Rip land at the tuk-tuk parking lot, and the latter will take you to your destination. This option is also not bad - you can immediately arrange with the tuker about your visit to Angkor Wat the next day.
As I said, there is almost no alternative to a taxi from Poipet to Sim Rip. But there is a tricky wiring. In general, in Cambodia and Thailand you need to be on the lookout for wiring, a lot has been invented, and sometimes, because of their naivety and simplicity, they work flawlessly. Yes, you will never even think that it can be used as a trick. It’s like a game, and it’s better to perceive everything that’s happening that way. We, for example, two years ago in Bangkok were bred for half a day by the statement that the main attraction, the Royal Palace, did not work that day. And this myth was supported by all around. Passers-by, taxi drivers, sellers in the markets. As a result, the tukers drove us for several hours through the dubious temples of the peripheral areas of Bangkok, with a stop at numerous shops. Already at the end of the day, we decided to look at the palace at least from the outside, and found that it was open. And after all, even fifty meters from the entrance to it, when the endless stream of tourists entering there was already visible, a man stood and told us: “You guys are closed, the palace has died today, some famous Buddhist, and there’s a ceremony! Come on, I’ll better take you to other sights! ” At the box office of the palace hung a leaflet urging not to believe strangers, who claimed that the palace was closed.
So, about wiring in Poipet. You will be offered a free bus to the bus station, from which there are allegedly traveling basses to Siem Reap. Then you will be taken to the international Poipet bus station, which for some reason is located a few kilometers from the city, right in the open field, surrounded by beautiful flooded rice meadows. Is it because only one regular bus leaves from this bus station per day to Siem Reap, and it is impossible to leave this bus station except on it? Needless to say that taxi fares there will be higher than immediately at the border? Although people left there for the same $ 35. In general, it’s better not to fool yourself, but to look for travel companions and comfortably for the same money to go by taxi directly from the border.
It gets dark early in these latitudes. A taxi driver drove us straight into the sunset. On both sides of the straight, like an arrow, roads were boundless rice fields. Sometimes the lonely standing candles of coconut trees broke their smooth surface. The road to Sim Rip has recently been made, and therefore you can go fast - no one follows the rules here anyway. The driver overtakes motor scooters loaded with anything, pick-up trucks with grimy children in the back, bicycles suddenly appearing from dusk on the side of the road. Threads of burgundy primers branch off the road, getting lost somewhere among the rice carpets. Maroon, because the land in Cambodia is really red - such a feature of the soil.
Khmer villages with typical stilts typical of these places rush past. Some houses are solid, some are simpler, but still have walls and windows, while others are without them at all. A simple way of life can be observed right from the car window. As you approach Siem Reap, there are more and more villages, and their houses are getting better. A long day on the road comes to an end.
Every day, a huge number of travelers cross the border from Vietnam to Cambodia, as well as from Thailand and Cambodia, by bus, bike, car, etc. in both directions. Regular transport links are established between countries, mainly through buses. This is the cheapest way to get into the Khmer country, and therefore very popular.
The destination is served by Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian bus companies. The lion's share of all passenger traffic falls on the buses of Cambodian carriers. Most of them serve destinations whose departure points are Phnom Penh, Siem Riap and Sihanoukville, while Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City are the arrival points (or vice versa).
An important advantage of traveling with Cambodia bus companies is the increased attention to passengers and the provision of all kinds of support for crossing the border. Employees of carriers (stewards) either personally participate in the process of obtaining visas, or simply "follow" their customers, no matter what they get lost and do everything right. True, it should be noted that the cost of a visa, with such help, increases by at least $ 5 (instead of $ 30 you will have to pay $ 35). The price depends on the carrier. But, do not get hung up on this, because most tourists already pay for this top five, crossing the border on their own. This is due to the fact that at the border crossing, customs officers in every way try to inflate its value, finding various reasons for this (assistance in filling out questionnaires, lack of photographs, etc.).
On the Cambodian side, the most popular border crossings are: Poipet and MocBai. Drink (Poipet) - "exit" to Thailand, Mokbai (MocBai) - to Vietnam. We will talk about them, and about the features of border crossing from Vietnam to Cambodia and from Thailand to Cambodia below. Immediately make a reservation that crossing the border at land customs points is somewhat different from the similar procedure at the airport: there is much less order and more stupid fuss.
For crossing the border to Thailand, or from Thailand, the most commonly used border post is Drink (Poipet) , Thai side - Aranyaprathet (Aranyaprathet). Passing through it may seem like a difficult event, due to its confusion and vanity. Below is a brief outline of the actions at this outpost:
Border Crossing Cambodia - Thailand
Get an exit stamp (mark in the passport that its owner has left the camp). It is placed in a small building on the right side of the main road (behind the ring, which is indicated on the maps as Kbal Spean Circle).
Pass through the neutral zone to the territory of Thailand (on the right side).
Thailand passport control is located on the opposite side of Suwannason Street (on the left side of the Thai border gate, if you face them). Here you should get a visa and pass entry control.
Crossing the border from Thailand to Cambodia, procedure:
Get an exit stamp at Thai customs. To do this, go to the left side of the main road in the Star Plaza area and go straight to a small building with a high staircase.
Next, we move towards Cambodia, and on its territory (after the arch) we go to the right side and get to the visa department. It is already located on the land of the Khmers, immediately in front of a large white casino. Here, fill out a form, pay a visa fee, get a passport with a glued visa.
If the trip takes place with one of the bus companies, the staff of the carriers does not let their passengers out of sight and assists them in orienting themselves on the ground.
About the transition ... Immediately, we will make a reservation that there is NO anything problematic and extreme in passing customs procedures at this outpost, it is not big, just a little confused. The most important thing is to calmly and purposefully move in the right direction, carefully look around and at the signs, as well as ignore all offers of help - give a ride, suggest, speed up, help with advice ... etc. coming from strangers. Many who refuse this transition, especially for the first time, get the impression of complete chaos, and this is not far from the truth. Indeed, the place is more like a market, or at least a very busy station. In addition to people crossing the border, an unimaginable amount of different people is concentrated here: taxi drivers, helped, sellers of all kinds, beggars, thieves, etc. All this is in an unimaginable continuous movement. Of course, this may be a common occurrence for Asian countries, nevertheless, it is very weakly tied to the border post and creates not the most pleasant impression of Cambodia.
The location of the key points of the Border Crossing Poipet / Aranyaprathet on the map (to go to the interactive map, left-click on the picture):
Border point between vietnam and cambodia
Border crossing points between Vietnam and Cambodia - from Cambodia - Bavet, from the side of Vietnam - Moc Bai. The place is the exact opposite of the passage considered above between Thailand and Cambodia, here everything is much more cultural, more understandable and simpler. If, moving is carried out centrally (from bus companies), then the entire procedure for passing outposts is easy. Passports, completed questionnaires and visa fees are transferred to the carrier’s employees on the bus (questionnaires are issued on the bus), and then they do all the manipulations with them. Passengers have to go through customs and passport control, without unnecessary communication with border guards. In general, the process of leaving Vietnam to Cambodia looks like this:
On the Vietnamese side, we get a stamp about leaving (the building is one, it will be difficult to miss it);
We are moving in the direction of Cambodia, to the border crossing of the Khmer side. Here we fill out emigration cards and visa application forms, we get a visa;
We pass passport control, photograph fingers, we get a stamp on entry.
In the opposite direction (Cambodia - Vietnam) it is still easier, since you do not need to apply for a visa. By the way, you should pay attention to the fact that at the moment you can’t apply for a “long-term” Approval lette visa at the ground checkpoints in Vietnam, they just put a stamp on it that allows you to stay in the country for 15 days.
About the crossing ... If compared with the previous border crossing (Thailand - Cambodia), it is heaven and earth. Here, everything is quite civilian, understandable, and even relatively pure, as far as the words "civilian" and "pure" can be applied to Southeast Asia. There are no crowds of beggars, helped and other incomprehensible people. Yes, there are drivers who offer to carry passengers through the neutral zone, and money changers, and sellers of SIM cards, but these are all isolated cases, they do not go in crowds.
The location of the key border crossing points Bavet / Moc Bai on the map:
Border crossing Vietnam - Cambodia and Thailand - Cambodia, which should be noted:
Visas must be issued directly at the immigration services at the border. Do not resort to the services of agencies offering to arrange them in advance. Firstly, it will definitely cost more, and secondly, there is always a chance to run into scammers.
In the territory of the neutral zone, there are a lot of “helpers” of all kinds, who for a fee offer to speed up the process of obtaining visas, give a lift, tell me, etc. It is strongly recommended that you ignore them and not use any of the services offered.
- at all border points in Cambodia (regardless of whether it is located on the border with which country), the price for a visa is overpriced by $ 5. Regardless of the type of visa. There are two ways out, one of which is to include this amount in your expenses, and pay at the border (which the majority does), and the second to defend your innocence, to bargain with the border guards. This requires a certain margin of time. Not a very pleasant procedure, but to defend your point of view (and fair) is quite realistic. When paying for a visa, it is better to give an even amount, without surrender.
Crossing any border point is greatly simplified if the movement between countries occurs with one of the bus companies. Their employees will at least provide informational assistance (tell you where to go in order to get an entry / exit stamp, go through a visa, to customs control, etc.) and, as a maximum, will take on part of the work to complete some procedures. So, for example, when traveling along the route Vietnam - Cambodia, passengers are not even brought to the immigration center of Vietnam to obtain an exit stamp. The Stuarts simply deliver the documents themselves in a general crowd, and travelers see their documents only on the Cambodian side, with signs about the exit.
Between Ho Chi Minh City and the Moc Bai border post, regular communication is established through regular buses. Near the street Pham Ngu Lao (Pham Ngu Lao), daily, at around 8.00, bus No. 703 stops bus. The second bus serving the direction is No. 704. He leaves the eastern bus terminal of Ho Chi Minh City Mien Dong.
Nontrivial attractions of Siem Reap