My visa was about to expire so I had to move out of the country quickly. So from Koh Tao I went directly in Bangkok. I just stayed a day, the time to find where to go next and how to get there. I didn’t really visit anything; I just had enough time to get everything sorted. But I will come back here later in my trip to really visit.
I decided to go to Cambodia, so I look on internet the best way to get there. Find many very useful information and I realized that the border between Thailand and Cambodia was full of scam. I decided to make the trip all by myself instead of taking a mini bus “all included” from Bangkok to Siem reap as from what I have read it is much much longer and even if the price is really cheap, with all the scam they will put you in, it might end up being much more expensive!
So first I took a train during 6H for 1.5$, to get next to the border, then a tuk-tuk to reach the actual border where it is really chaotic and if you don’t know about all the scam you might pay a lot for everything. You can find fake Cambodian visa office on Thailand side that sell you fake visa, or charge you twice the price for the visa. Or some money exchange office that have some extremely poor rate, with a guy that find excuse to tell you that you have to change money now; and many other kind of scam like that.
After passing the Cambodian border, there is a free bus to bring you to the bus station, and from there I took a bus to go to Siem Reap, and one more scam with that, is that the bus will not go all the way to Siem Reap but just leave you at the entrance of the town, and “sell” you to a group of overpriced tuk tuk that wait to bring you in town (and they will try to bring you to the guest house of their choice to get a commission).
Except for the last one where you can’t really do anything about it I managed to avoid all the scams and the whole trip cost me about 35$, but if you fall into all the scams it can easily cost you up to 100$ !!!
As a summary about my trip in Thailand, as you probably noticed, I have seen only islands, most of the island in Thailand actually. I’ll see the rest of Thailand when I will come back in few weeks.
My feeling about that is reserved. The scenery everywhere is incredibly beautiful many amazing things to see, very nice place to relax, a lot of awesome party, I really love it. But in the other side, they really don’t know anything about sustainable development. They really don’t care about the environment, and I think that’s really sad and will be a big problem for the country. As long as they can make a little bit of money… they do it, and really don’t care at all about any consequences, for example it is definitively very bad to feed the monkey (for the environment, the neighbourhood, and for the monkey itself), everyone know it here, but every place where there is monkey you will find someone that sell “monkey food”. I have seen a place some people sell monkey food for tourist, and at the same time, the guardian of the monument nearby is forced to throw firecracker to make monkey go away. On One island they even throw heaps of fruit, water bottle and food on a small remote beach to make sure there is always monkey there and so they have one more touristic attraction to make money. Each tour stop on that “monkey beach” and throw some more fruit, and more bottle water next to their boat so the monkey come close and all the tourist get amazed by the monkey drinking from the bottle or eating food…. But they will never even think about taking the bottle back with then once it’s empty… so the plastic bottles stacks on the beach or in the ocean….
Also all very beautiful spot are always over exploited, there is always way more people visiting these places than what the places can really handle. They have no restriction about the number of people that can visit a place per day, as long as there is people that are ready to pay to see it, they will find a way to make it happen even if that mean stacking thousands of people on very small area.
It is almost impossible to find garbage bin anywhere so all the garbage stacks on the island and in the ocean… also it seems that they fish as much as they possibly can, regardless of the amount of fish in the ocean…
In other word, these islands are amazing to visit, but if you think about visiting it “one day” you better hurry up and make that day happen very soon!!
The beautiful island are getting slowly transformed into plastic islands, the crystal clear water are getting more and more petrol patch and boat pollution In the ocean the jellyfish are getting slowly replaced by plastic bags, the fish by straws, plastic bottles and glasses, and the corals by tires, bottles, cans and shit like that…
Overall it is still awesome place to visit; I had amazing time, just my “ecological freak” part get very sad to see what’s happening.
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